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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

#511

Post by tptacek »

gedy wrote: post #506
tptacek wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

American student loan debt skews sharply towards the top income quartile.

Yes, granted it was over 20 years ago, but I came from a pretty broke household in the United States, and I went to a cheap state school instead of a nicer university or private school because I couldn’t imagine borrowing for school. The folks I know who were much more well off, seem to have had no problem borrowing what I considered to be exorbitant sums to both pay for school and live off of.

In a redistributive sense it is very much like American homeowners complaining about their mortgage debt.

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

#512

Post by jack_tripper »

jacquesm wrote: post #281
jack_tripper wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the point completely. I was not talking about why hospital debt is big, but the difference in how debt in general of all sizes gets collected. Because in most of Europe even a 50 Euro debt will be collected, medical or not. while in the US it seems you can live just fine with a lot of debt that somehow nobody bothers to collect. And your hospital in Europe DOES collect the half million Euro bill, for s…

I've paid out of pocket for a medical procedure in Europe and the price was a very small fraction of what it would have been in the US. The 50 buck debt in europe will be collected because it is an actual debt, not something some hospital made up. See TFA.

>I've paid out of pocket for a medical procedure in Europe

For a second time in a row now you're deviating again from the topic of my point of debt collection just to go on an off-topic rant again on how expensive the US is compared to what you did in Europe. Why do you keep doing this? Are you trolling or is it some attention deficit disorder I should account for?

Forget about medical bills. Let's say you have 50 Euro debt from an unpaid internet/electricity bill if that makes it easier for you to get out of the medical conversation into the debt collation US vs EU topic. In the US you can doge unpaid bills and rack up debt with little to no consequences, while in the EU not since the government goes after you, which makes the debt situation for US citizens incomparable to Europeans. Are you following so far or are you still fixated on how cheap medical bills are for you in Europe?

>The 50 buck debt in europe will be collected because it is an actual debt, not something some hospital made up.

How do you decide what is actual debt and what is made up?

With that logic then all debt is made up because all money in circulation is made up and all prices are made up. I'm gonna walk out of the restaurant without paying the bill because we all know the 200 Euros for a steak is a made up price.

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

#513

Post by lesuorac »

sxg wrote: post #486
throwforfeds wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but Americans have an incredible amount of student loan debt too. Something like $1.7 trillion. If you can get into one of the best schools in the world that has a huge endowment, then sure, you'll get grants and whatnot. It may even be free, in the case of Harvard. But then there's a long tail of schools that are honestly not that great, charging only slightly less than the top schools per year, with smaller ai…

Public service loan forgiveness (PSLF) exists and a huge number of people in medical professions actually take advantage of it. I know of multiple medical students and residents with over $500k in debt that are in the process of having all of their loans forgiven after 10 years in training and a total cost of approximately $75–150k for their entire education. Sure, that's still a decent amount of money, but it's very…

How successful are those people being?

IIUC, there was a bit of a scandal where the companies the DoE where paying to manage those 10 year forgiveness plans where giving incorrect advice and so a lot of people aren't going to qualify.

https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bece...

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

#514

Post by micromacrofoot »

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]

It's precisely as many have said over decades at this point: the poor in our country hate themselves to the extent that they view being poor as a personal failing, and voting for free services for everyone is therefore dishonorable. I talk to people like this every day and it's frustrating.

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

#516

Post by bleepblap »

nxor wrote: post #498
onli wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Careful there, thats a rightwing propaganda point. Immigration into an aging society does not raise healthcare costs, it lowers it. See https://archive.is/XxfTH (and note that this is a NZZ article, a right-wing publication by now, so not slanted towards being immigration friendly).

Are people ever allowed to criticize migration?

Sure, but it helps to not misrepresent the facts while you do it

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

#517

Post by sumeno »

tptacek wrote: post #445
basisword wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> University is expensive as fck. While healthcare is brought up all the time this is usually ignored. The idea of parents saving a 'college fund' for their child is something I only know from movies. It's such a strange idea that access to education would be something you either need to be able to afford or need to get a 'scholarship' for (another strange concept).

Implicit in all these stories is that "education" means "access to highly selective universities". In-state tuition at Directional State University is much more manageable.

Not really. I went to a public land grant university 20 years ago and paid about $12k a year in state. That same university is now $44k per year.

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

#518

Post by sumeno »

nxor wrote: post #491
jkartchner wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You believe the top 60% of the nation skew in the upper income levels? Median pay is $61k a year for the entire country. The top 1% skews to the upper income levels. The rest are charged $30 for a dose of aspirin and can't afford it.

People in the US can't afford aspirin? Where do you live? It's just not true

They are referring to the price that hospitals charge for aspirin, which is massively inflated, not the off the shelf cost of aspirin

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

#519

Post by vel0city »

ryao wrote: post #198
noir_lord wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone with medical conditions from a country with universal publicly funded health care, while it may not be flawless (though in terms of actual medical treatment, no complaints either) it sure does seem to be a whole hell of a lot better than the alternative. Not once have I had a sleepless night since been diagnosed over a decade ago about insurance, co-pay or how to afford my drugs/medical treatment. I’m on t…

Are the outcomes in the US worse? Not that long ago (a couple months ago in fact), I looked at public data comparing cancer survival rates, which put the outcomes in the US at least 10% better than those in the UK. That was additive, such that a 20% survival rate in the UK for a type of cancer is at least a 30% survival rate in the US. The 10%+ better outcome in the US applied to all types of cancers for which I foun…

You're taking quite a small view of healthcare in the end looking at only cancer outcomes. Just ignoring things like maternal mortality, infant mortality, cardiovascular issues, etc.

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

#520

Post by stackskipton »

A1kmm wrote: post #507

One thing here doesn't seem right. I thought the whole thread that this was about them negotiating down how much the executor of a deceased estate would pay to one hospital making claims against it. But the thread included things like: "She had been afraid of being sent to collections and asked why we wouldn’t just take their counter-offer", which suggests a (mis)understanding that it is a personal debt of the sister…

Depending on the state and their laws, spouses can be responsible for debt. Along with that, hospital could maybe not sue her but sue husband estate and those liabilities would trickle down onto shared assets so if they had a house, it's now got a lien attached to it.
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