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The fight between doctors and insurance companies over 'downcoding'

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Re: The fight between doctors and insurance companies over 'downcoding'

#21
post #2

Good startup idea would be to work with medical practices to use AI to automate the disputing of the "downcoding" by insurers.

You would have to leverage the law (if you have one) that involves the state resolving the dispute because otherwise the automated disputes would probably be dropped on the floor. The insurance company has the leverage because they're actually in possession of the money and the contract that gives them stupidly high discretion on how much to pay out.

Doing nothing but flipping the burden, doctors get paid whatever they invoice and insurance have to claw it back would make a lot of this stonewalling bullshit go away. But with an openly corrupt government paid by insurance it'll never happen.

Re: The fight between doctors and insurance companies over 'downcoding'

#22
post #3

If someone invoices me, and I don’t pay the full amount in a timely manner, what do you think will happen? Late fees, reports to credit bureaus, collections agencies hounding me, maybe even lawsuits? If insurance companies underpay, doctors should treat that no differently. Don’t appeal through the insurance company itself. Imagine I go to a store and pay less than the full amount at the register, and then the grocer…

Sure but imagine you hire a landscaper and they send you a $40 invoice for $20 of law cutting and $20 of leaf cleanup. You go look outside and see a ton of leafs so you just send them $20.

That's the insurance companies' stance. The work you performed is this and so our agreed upon rate is this.

Re: The fight between doctors and insurance companies over 'downcoding'

#23
post #20
post #11

For what it's worth, this sort of gaming works both ways. Many medical administrations do everything they can to upcode in order to bill for more money. The whole system is a mess.

It's beyond our control, says only country where this happens daily.

Pretty sure fraudulent billing practices exist in a variety of nations and industries.

Re: The fight between doctors and insurance companies over 'downcoding'

#24
I went to the dentist a couple of weeks ago and had the shortest dental visit I've had. They did the X-rays, then the dental assistant spent five minutes cleaning my teeth and pronounced them good. The dentist came in and looked for about one minute and said they were fine. I was sent on my way.

They billed my insurance for over a thousand dollars.

Re: The fight between doctors and insurance companies over 'downcoding'

#25
post #2

Good startup idea would be to work with medical practices to use AI to automate the disputing of the "downcoding" by insurers.

Its a terrible business.

The data is a disaster. Turnover is high, errs everywhere. Disputing is the easy part. Hard part is finding the contracts lol.

Re: The fight between doctors and insurance companies over 'downcoding'

#26
post #3

If someone invoices me, and I don’t pay the full amount in a timely manner, what do you think will happen? Late fees, reports to credit bureaus, collections agencies hounding me, maybe even lawsuits? If insurance companies underpay, doctors should treat that no differently. Don’t appeal through the insurance company itself. Imagine I go to a store and pay less than the full amount at the register, and then the grocer…

Insurers (payers in the industry lingo) simply don’t pay or underpay.

Proving this sucks bc smaller practices have horrible staff turnover, the EMRs are dog shit and the contracts are who knows where and in what format.

Recovery is beyond the scope of most small practices.

Its a nightmare where providers are often shorted millions of dollars and that ends up coming out of the patient’s pocket.

Everyone yammering about upcoding on this thread is blissfully clueless.

Re: The fight between doctors and insurance companies over 'downcoding'

#27
post #8

Ah yes, this is a fight between the practices (sometimes not the doctors!) upcoding their visits and the insurance companies wanting to push back and downcode the visits to what they actually entailed. Healthcare practices want to maximize revenue and push up the “level” of a doctors visit and they can do it with just adding one or two extra little questionnaires or an extra test or two that you might not pay attenti…

I never understood why insurers get all the flack while the providers get a pass.

FWIW I hate most medical billing departments (and hospitals are the worst) about as much as I hate insurance.

They're at least as likely to fuck something up (curiously, always in their favor, not yours) as insurers, from what I've seen. And they're almost as unpleasant to deal with—at least they don't generally keep you on hold for literal hours, but it's still not great.

And one of the ugliest public-facing roles in all of American medicine has to be the insurance-vultures whose job is to hover about emergency rooms pestering very-sick people for their billing information. Fucking gross.

Re: The fight between doctors and insurance companies over 'downcoding'

#29
post #3

If someone invoices me, and I don’t pay the full amount in a timely manner, what do you think will happen? Late fees, reports to credit bureaus, collections agencies hounding me, maybe even lawsuits? If insurance companies underpay, doctors should treat that no differently. Don’t appeal through the insurance company itself. Imagine I go to a store and pay less than the full amount at the register, and then the grocer…

So what should happen when Docs lie about what procedures they did? Because it happens quite frequently and for some reason is always left out of these discussions.

Man, it's almost like healthcare and human lives shouldn't be for profit...

Re: The fight between doctors and insurance companies over 'downcoding'

#30
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's beyond our control, says only country where this happens daily.

Pretty sure fraudulent billing practices exist in a variety of nations and industries.

Other countries are making efforts to keep things in check though https://www.npr.org/2025/01/04/nx-s1-5246231/potential-fraud.... The US for some reason can’t even address blatant fraud. One example is the stuff insurers do with Medicare Advantage. There is fraud and Congress knows about it but besides some hearings nothing is happening.
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