Worst part it shouldn't even be called "negotiation". It was just plainly fraudulent.
Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k
21–30 of 954 posts
Re: Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k
#22this is what the doomers want to take from you
Re: Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k
#23Double billing is an insanely common problem. How it’s gone for me in the past is like this:
Provider wants to do procedure. You need it right away, or the procedure allows pre approval with the assumption insurance won’t haggle or deny payment
insurance company denies payment
provider bills you
what i learned is, often, the provider will eventually be paid. do they tell you? not usually. oh woops. I haven’t very successfully fought these other than just hours of phone calls with both companies chasing down what actually got paid and when, and they on purpose make it difficult. If you find yourself in this situation do NOT pay the hospital until the last possible moment it will go to collections. often, you’ll find it mysteriously disappears. it also doesnt hurt your credit very much anyway if it does.
There’s no real defense of these practices or of the industry in general as it exists in the USA.
anything <$500 now by CA law cant show up on credit report so I basically stopped paying those. unethical? sure. will it affect the quality of my care? probably. sometimes though being a deliberate pain in the ass feels better than letting the system fuck you over and over.
Re: Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k
#24It seems like the AIs role was in applying lengthy and complex medicare billing rules - it did not do negotiating and it doesn't seem like the accuracy of its understanding of medicare practices was actually checked. The author reasonably accused the hospital of gouging and the hospital came back with a much lower offer. I'd be interested to hear from a charge coding expert about Claude's analysis here and if it was…
Totally agree that even this buggy expert can empower patients. But you better believe that hospitals all over the place are also using AI to find ways around Medicare/Insurance rules to maximize their profit too. The rules are probably going to get WAY more complex because they will rely less on a few humans, and more on very powerful AIs.
Old poker adage: "The more wild cards and crazy rules, the greater the expert's advantage."
Poker has nothing on Commercial Lawfare.
Re: Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k
#25While it's an interesting story, I doubt they needed Claude to work a hospital bill down to that amount. Hospital billing folks are acutely aware that the initial bill is outrageous and indefensible from their end. I've heard a ton of cases where folks basically "pay what they can" for the bill and that's good enough for both parties. I doubt the reasoning Claude provided was ultimately what got the hospital to knock…
IMO the pro move is not to get the hospital to accept what an insurance company would pay, but get them to accept slightly more than what a debt collector would pay.
Re: Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k
#26The real treat would be using AI to stop regulatory capture so you don't end up in a country where it's okay to be presented with a 195K bill that can be magically lowered if you insist hard enough.
It seems pretty messed up when a $30k bill is written up like a big win.
Their brother presumably didn't have insurance, and it sounds like some pretty major procedures involving specialists, equipment, and hospital intake. While the outcome was horrible, all of those people need to get paid for the services rendered somehow if we want folks in the US to continue receiving this standard of care.
Re: Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k
#27Interesting. Upshot - bill sent to Claude, Claude generated questions, human in the loop to negotiate and summarize. Ultimately they suggested a number to the hospital, the hospital chiseled them a few grand, and they settled. Not mentioned, and I'm interested, is how accurate Claude's reading of the various medicare rules are. I presume these letters went to someone who had only slightly more knowledge of medicare b…
Yes, wish I could see the Claude conversation here.
The good news is this should be easy to reproduce to see how it does - just google around for an example medical bill with billing codes and feed it to Claude.
Re: Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k
#28Relevant: The End of the Rip-Off Economy https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/10/27/t...
Re: Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k
#29For all my constant freak-outs about AI in general, it turned out to be a godsend last year when my wife’s mom was hospitalized (and later passed away a few weeks afterward). Multimodal ChatGPT had just become available on mobile, so being able to feed it photos of her vital sign monitors to figure out what was going on, have it translate what the doctors were telling us in real time, and explain things clearly made an incredible difference. I even used it to interpret legal documents and compare them with what the attorneys were telling us — again, super helpful.
And when the bills started coming in, it helped there too. Hard to say if we actually saved anything — but it certainly didn’t hurt.
Re: Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k
#30[flagged]
Can’t negotiate a bill if you’re not getting a bill.