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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

#291

Post by timeon »

alistairSH wrote: post #132
jack_tripper wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That was an overly simplistic response. We do have credit scores in the US, and defaulting on medical bills can (but doesn't always) impact someone's score. Without a high score, you don't get the best interest rates on loans. Or, might not be eligible for a security clearance (government work) or jobs in some industries (banking and other "high trust" fields). Or might not be able to rent an apartment. But, the othe…

Credit score is another thing I have hard time comprehend. I wanted to borrow car outside of EU and was not unable to because there was no record on me with some private company that stored data about credit cards. That was wild experience - like some social credit in China. I just prefer rule of law than these hacks on society.

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

#292

Post by inerte »

timeon wrote: post #266
Capricorn2481 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wildly false. This thread is full of people sharing stories of being supposedly "insured" and getting fucked anyway. The complete lack of transparency around what your insurance covers, something you can't be expected to verify while in the middle of a dire medical crisis, can lead to a life destroying bill. Nobody should have to be wondering what company an ambulance works for. It's crazy. The whole world thinks it'…

> Nobody should have to be wondering what company an ambulance works for. Is this real?!

The latest advice is to call an Uber instead of an ambulance.

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

#293

Post by the_sleaze_ »

aprdm wrote: post #107
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,…

I am sorry to hear that. A friend of mine who moved from US to Canada moved after his mother had cancer on her 60s. She was retired by then after having a very successful career (C level on some manufacture company). His mom died poor. Crazy country.

It's probably unsaid that she died with a good credit rating as well.

You don't necessarily need to pay back those loans, and most of the time the hospital has to negotiate a feasible repayment plan.

Medical bills have to lowest life-improvement rating of them all. That is to say paying off someones medical bills will have one of the lowest impacts to their lives compared to another financial intervention.

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

#294

Post by lanfeust6 »

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…

Great story, and encapsulates what I find most powerful about LLMs.

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

#295

Post by liendolucas »

$33k is still lot of money! What happens if you don't have that sum? How does the system allow to be arbitrary charged on health?

I'm Argentinian and while we might be a country lagging behind in so many things these kind of ripoffs do not happen.

How come the US government allows this? From other stories sometimes posted, the US seems to be one of the worst countries in the world to either die or get sick.

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

#296

Post by tptacek »

ransom1538 wrote: post #275
egorfine wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Medicare has a total enrollment of approximately 69 million people, while Medicaid has around 83 million people. That is 152 million people. We already have socialized medicine we just run it poorly and don't apply it to people that can pay. Moving our system to 340 million people + letting our corporations out of paying would put the US into an economic death spiral. US corporations would love this plan. But at 340…

Medicaid is apparently 77MM including CHIP. The underlying compromise in the system that you're describing is sane: people's health care costs rise dramatically and unpredictably at retirement age, just as their ability to pay plummets, so socializing health care at that point makes a lot of sense.

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

#297

Post by macrolime »

alistairSH wrote: post #103
potato3732842 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. You can do this with anything where the racket is based around the layman not being able to take in the amount of arcane subject matter info they'd need to argue their case, not just medical. Tons of institutions that specialize in screwing people are built this way because it's pretty hard to "overtly" build an institution to screw people.

Not just arcane subject matter, but numbers so high any sane person panics. Hospital: "Here's your bill for $1,000,000." (a figure which is 100% fictional) Patient: "Oh shit, I don't have $1,000,000!" Hospital: "Oh, we'll reduce it to $30,000. Aren't we nice!" Patient: "I don't have $30,000 either, but it might not bankrupt me immediately, so I guess that'll do..." Never mind that the same procedure in most of the EU…

In the EU you can also generally look up the cost, even in cases where the patient doesn't pay, there is a bill and fixed costs. The costs are what the government pays or what a foreigner with no medical coverage and insurance would pay. It's also generally a tiny fraction of the cost in the US.

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

#298

Post by LawnGnome »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #177
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #108

The 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

Because 92% of Americans have health insurance, and 22% have totally free everything covered health insurance. Of the uninsured, most either are eligible but don't apply, have insurance through work but forgo it, or are not US citizens. All said and done, you end up with a very small sliver of people who are legitimately uninsured, which means the problem mostly exists as scary stories rather than people actually exp…

As a non-American, I think the thing I'm hung up on in what you said is that I don't understand why a developed country should allow anyone to be "uninsured".

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

#299

Post by gosub100 »

zarmsdos wrote: post #262
egorfine wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Decades of right-wing propaganda, unfortunately. They tend to have an emotional reaction against any sort of socialized anything, including healthcare.

Left wing won't solve it either. They profit from the crisis by promising each election and not delivering.

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

#300

Post by gowld »

woadwarrior01 wrote: post #181
atourgates wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the author calls criminal is the way hospitals typically bill Medicare and private insurance providers. If the OPs brother-in-law had had insurance, the hospital would have billed the insurance company the same $195k (albeit with CPT codes in the first place). The insurance company would have come back and said, "Ok, great, thanks for the bill. We've analyzed it, and you're authorized to received $37k (or whatev…

> What the author calls criminal is the way hospitals typically bill Medicare and private insurance providers. Interestingly enough, the FBI considers double billing and phantom billing by medical providers, to be fraud. https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/white-collar-crime/health-ca...

And yet Florida elected a Senator who earned over $100M doing just that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Scott

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