Such a case when one must pay a good portion of a home price for a man dying in a hospital, is why I won't ever try to move to the US, and will retell story to everyone considering.
Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k
111–120 of 954 posts
Re: Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I've just ignored any medical bill As a not-American, I wonder what are the rules of this "game". Can anyone in the US just ignore their bills and debt and it's all ignored anyway? Because in most European countries, debt is a very serious thing. Even small debt like an unpaid 50 Euro bill can be sold to debt collectors who can seize your property or garnish your wage, pension or bank accounts to pay your debt plus…
Basically the only thing debt collectors can do in the US (if the amount is too small to justify a lawsuit) is harass you with phone calls. I have DND except for contacts on anyway so I dont notice it. Edit: also credit score of course. Almost anything does affect your score. Except for medical stuff for me for some reason - I have a good credit score.
Damn, well in that case that explains why a lot of people in the US can be in debt yet so care free, which is unthinkable to us here in Europe as even small debts carry consequences.
Re: Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
The direction is clear though; enable healthcare consumers using generative AI to appeal their bills, and scale up. If it breaks insurance companies and healthcare billing departments, well, we could fix this, right? It is a choice not to, healthcare consumers will act accordingly as rational actors in a suboptimal system. Working systems are rarely changed; failing systems at least have the opportunity for change to…
I like the idea but I'm sure that's a YC startup working on juicing revenue from patients being spun at the same time.
So build faster and better than YC to defend society|humanity against YC portfolio companies (not all, of course, just the harmful ones) until politics can close the gap. There is no speed limit. There is no moat. The only thing you don't have is ~$500k in investment [1]. Constraint breeds creativity. Be creative, stay curious.
Re: Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k
#114The American Medical Association owns copyright to all the codes and their descriptions. They have an extremely restrictive and expensive licensing options and they strictly forbid training models with the codes. This month, the practice was called out ( https://www.help.senate.gov/rep/newsroom/press/chair-cassidy... ) so the Overton window may be opening. The AMA (a nonprofit!) clears ~$300M/year revenue from the co…
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Re: Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k
#115We suddenly woke up in the Kafka-esque purgatory of critical American healthcare billing. We’re in our 50s and had been perfectly healthy, then suddenly we got diagnosed with what will be over $500k in treatment over the next 12 months— and multiple millions for the foreseeable future. We have insurance, but many of the required procedures are “out of network” and there’s no way to tell (we have “the best” insurance,…
For such sums, you're probably better off calling the best private hospitals in France, UK, Germany, whatever, taking the trip, doing whatever treatment there and paying out of pocket, having some holiday, and you're still ahead.
Of course that would only work if you can take the time off from work, have the same treatment available elsewhere, and being able to actually travel with whatever illness you have.
Re: Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k
#116The rest of the western world just looks at this as wonders why Americans put up with this. Using the latest in technology to move an a bill from existential to merely crippling
What I wonder is people are ok paying hundreds of dollars and going bankrupt but they haven't heard of taking a flight to a location that doesn't bleed them dry? They haven't heard of medical tourism?
Re: Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k
#117One of my most successful uses of ai is dealing with various obtuse German bureaucracies, private and public.
I don’t think the ai is being particularly smart in my case, and its occasionally flat wrong.
What it does give me is persistence and motivation. I have a nice workflow cobbled together that lets me dump OCRd scans and digital comms into “workspaces” organized by topic. With that workflow, I can basically dump a letter in, say “wtf is it now?”, and have the llm spit out a response. I do basic due diligence and send. Done. They don’t have to be that accurate, and neither do I.
I feel like I have a new superpower now: outlasting it, whatever it is this time.
Re: Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k
#118Used Claude to negotiate a 50% bump in a car insurance payout citing laws I didn't know existed. Yeah you have to cross check things and direct the prompt for tone and angle, but what an incredible leveling mechanism.
Re: Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k
#119I had an odd but successful experience with medical billing recently. My daughter went to urgent care for an urgent problem; after things were mostly cleared up, they transferred her by ambulance to an ER (even though there was no emergency). Both the urgent care and ER were handled by our insurance but the ambulance company sent us a large bill ($4K for a short drive) which felt too large to us (they had already tri…
as long as we have a significant portion of healthcare users who are basically fully price insensitive but not subject to any rationing, absurd US medical costs will continue.
Re: Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k
#120with or without AI you'd be shocked at how much of a medical bill can disappear if you just ask. Ask for an itemized bill, then ask what programs they have available to help. The real fact is that the hospital barely knows what they did to you, has no idea what it should cost overall, has a foggy idea of much you'll pay vs your insurance (but only a foggy idea because of all of the constantly-shifting backroom deals that insurers and providers make with one another), and then whatevertf price they arrive at with all of this gets an arbitrary number tacked onto it designed to mitigate the fact that a lot of people just don't pay their bill at all and it's not like the hospital can reach into them and claw back their $80 tylenol if they don't get paid, so they just bill it forward and hope that most people will look at their bill as the final word on the subject and pay it despite the fact that they're being badly overcharged. Combine this with the "reject all claims and hope they don't follow up" model of insurance and you can see where this all clearly needs to burn to the ground so that something that works can grow in its place, but also where a lot of people get really rich doing it this way and no one gets super rich when services are provided at a reasonable price so there's no real will to unruin this system. So what we end up with is a system where we pay a lot more than everyone else in the developed world and, for our money, we get to die earlier, which may or may not be preferable to dealing with the american healthcare system. When I was figuring out what I actually owed for my 4 days in the hospital for diverticultitis I strongly considered just dying next time.