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Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k

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Re: Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k

#371

Post by BrenBarn »

willio58 wrote: post #338
egorfine wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The United States is a democracy, but more specifically, a representative democracy. That means citizens don’t directly vote on most laws or policies—aside from certain state or local measures—but instead elect representatives to make those decisions on our behalf. The idea is that we trust them to act in our best interests. You can probably see where the problem comes in. Take, for example, a politician who campaign…

> The United States is a democracy, but more specifically, a representative democracy.

As your following explanation makes clear, it's actually an unrepresentative democracy.

Re: Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k

#372

Post by svobodovic »

egorfine wrote: post #352
willio58 wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The United States is a democracy, but more specifically, a representative democracy. That means citizens don’t directly vote on most laws or policies—aside from certain state or local measures—but instead elect representatives to make those decisions on our behalf. The idea is that we trust them to act in our best interests. You can probably see where the problem comes in. Take, for example, a politician who campaign…

Ah, so Americans are okay with that system as well. Got it.

How did you come to this conclusion from the previous answer/comment?

Re: Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k

#373

Post by codegeek »

egorfine wrote: post #366
codegeek wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great question. No one "wants" insurance. Everyone wants to be able to get covered for care. The problem is that Govt decided decades ago that Health Insurance is the only way to get care even for mundane things like a regular doctor visit. To make it worse, they tied it to Employers needing to provide insurance. Insurance companies love this bureaucracy and became too powerful over the last few decades. It is a sad…

> I m lucky enough to afford healthcare Up to a point, I guess? Correct me if I'm wrong.

Yes and it still sucks because I hate wasting my hard earned money because of a random number thrown at me for the so called "Claim". Fk the entire insurance industry especially health insurance mafia.

And don't get me started on the inefficiencies and waste of time that you have to go through to fight a "claim" that is incorrect.

Re: Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k

#374

Post by evan_ »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #268
chrisgeleven wrote: post #245

I fought insurance over this past summer after they declined covering a life saving surgery for my 6-year-old child at the last minute. We were in despair that my child's life was at risk each day we waited because of insurance incompetence. ChatGPT literally guided me through the whole external appeal process, who to contact outside of normal channels to ask for help / apply pressure, researched questions I had, hel…

I was under the impression that if you were to go to an emergency room, life saving surgery would be scheduled regardless of who is paying (or not paying), due to EMTALA. I can't imagine a hospital waiting for an insurance company's approval to pay for a procedure to schedule a child's life saving surgery. Is this incorrect?

if the kid has a steel spike through his abdomen then they will perform that surgery. If he's having seizures because of a brain tumor all they're required to do is stabilize and release.

Re: Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k

#375

Post by tpurves »

egorfine wrote: post #253
chrisgeleven wrote: post #245

I fought insurance over this past summer after they declined covering a life saving surgery for my 6-year-old child at the last minute. We were in despair that my child's life was at risk each day we waited because of insurance incompetence. ChatGPT literally guided me through the whole external appeal process, who to contact outside of normal channels to ask for help / apply pressure, researched questions I had, hel…

[flagged]

America is trapped in a cycle where political parties have discovered that fear and anger drives voters whereas contentment with status quo does not motivate turnout. This leads to a scenario where parties will actively sabotage the resolution of painpoint issues such as immigration, healthcare, gun control etc. so long as it continues to create anger and fear that they can successfully blame on the other party. This behavior extends to voting against their own proposed policies in the interest of seizing/maintaining power over problem solving. And now deliberately creating crises (both real and fictional ones) has become the game-theory dominant strategy in American politics.

Re: Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k

#376

Post by fukka42 »

throwaway0123_5 wrote: post #325
georgeecollins wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the reason is that people know it is a problem but ideologically they really disagree about what to do about it. The impasse creates an opportunity for profit driven actors to fight reforms. Also, democracies do dumb things sometimes. See Brexit. But also, sometimes people from other countries-- I am thinking parts of Europe-- underestimate how well paid people in the US often are. They compare the averages,…

> So like these are less serious issues if you are paid an extra $1-200k/ year Ok but to be fair most people in the US aren't making "extra $1-200k / year" over a person in Europe. They aren't even making $100k / year to begin with.

It's hilariously out of touch, but it's what you should expect from the HN bros. They live in a bubble.

I'm from the eu and earn far less than these American techbros do, but far more than my American friends who work normal jobs. They work at the DMV, a supermarket, or general office work. You know, normal people. The vast majority.

Re: Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k

#377

Post by jb1991 »

BrenBarn wrote: post #371
willio58 wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The United States is a democracy, but more specifically, a representative democracy. That means citizens don’t directly vote on most laws or policies—aside from certain state or local measures—but instead elect representatives to make those decisions on our behalf. The idea is that we trust them to act in our best interests. You can probably see where the problem comes in. Take, for example, a politician who campaign…

> The United States is a democracy, but more specifically, a representative democracy. As your following explanation makes clear, it's actually an unrepresentative democracy.

There are very few countries in the world that are not a representative democracy. Switzerland is a well-known example of a country where citizens directly vote on most legislation, but in most other countries, you have a parliament, congress, etc that represents the people.

Re: Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k

#378

Post by datadrivenangel »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #250
swiftcoder wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This only makes sense if they have no competitors since another insurance company would just steal their customers by having lower rates. This assumes the competitors are not all colluding to raise prices across the board

Then they must suck at collusion, given they can't even beat a risk-less broad market index. SP500 10 year annual return: 14.6% UNH: 13.59% Elevance: 10.79% Cigna 9.42% Humana: 6.1% CVS: 0.55% Molina: 9.42% Centene: 0.9% Or, the likelier explanation, is that health insurance prices are highly regulated and have to get their prices approved by a government official(s), and B) they don't have a lot of pricing power due…

Executives earn more based on revenues and thus prices and not stock returns.

Re: Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k

#380

Post by tonymet »

wbronitsky wrote: post #127
tonymet wrote: post #48

We 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,…

Matt Stoller, a journalist who blogs about monopolies, just wrote all about the pricing issue this week: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-obamaca... America has doubled down on middlemen controlling the prices of medical care and making sure that there is no set price for anything. With the ACA effectively falling apart in the new budget, we do have a chance to move to a different reality, one whe…

I’ll look into it. From what I can tell it’s not a simple hero vs villain story. It feels more like an industrial disaster or the AWS outage where there are like a dozen compounding system failures leading to where we are today.

Medical billing is like a massive centuries-old tenement building with a patchwork of legacy plumbing, electrical , framing, sewage all patched together with decades of duct tape, wood shards, and rusty couplings. But in this case there’s massive incentives to keep it all bodged because each pipe and crevice hides billions of un-audited income.

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