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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

#481

Post by lotsofpulp »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #378
lotsofpulp wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

See almost any of the proxy filings and you will see much of the compensation is based on hitting targets other than just revenue, and most of the compensation itself is equity:

https://www.unitedhealthgroup.com/content/dam/UHG/PDF/invest...

https://s202.q4cdn.com/665319960/files/doc_financials/2025/a...

The executives seem to have a heavy interest in equity returns.

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

#482

Post by throwway120385 »

Aurornis wrote: post #469
nonfamous wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that's hard to understand from the outside is that almost nobody actually pays those mind-blowing $200K hospital bills. US hospitals charge on a sliding scale based on the applicants' families' ability to pay. (I don’t mean to belittle your comment about universities which is factual and helpful. I’m just pointing out that US education system is just as fucked up as the US healthcare system the OP is talkin…

Also very true, and a good point. Even people in the US don't understand why those $200K hospital bills aren't real. Insurance providers (including government programs) have a fixed limit for what they pay for procedures. They pay min(billed_amount, allowed_amount) so providers don't want to risk leaving money on the table by having billed_amount So every time you see posts on the internet where people talk about the…

That depends a lot on your insurance. For example, our out of pocket for my son's birth was somewhere in the neighborhood of $10k after insurance. I've met tons of people who would be bankrupted by that amount. What you're describing isn't true for people on High Deductible Health Plans, and those plans are a bit of a racket because they're frequently paired with HSAs where the employer gets to pocket anything left in the account at the end of the year. My son was essentially unplanned, in the sense that we gave up on trying to have a kid but weren't using birth control because over the previous 3 years we had not had a successful pregnancy. So an HSA would have been no help for us.

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

#484

Post by robrenaud »

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]

A lot of employed people like the status quo for the healthcare that they receive.

"In contrast to their largely negative assessments of the quality and coverage of healthcare in the U.S., broad majorities of Americans continue to rate their own healthcare’s quality and coverage positively. Currently, 71% of U.S. adults consider the quality of healthcare they receive to be excellent or good, and 65% say the same of their own coverage. There has been little deviation in these readings since 2001.

Compared with their counterparts, older adults and those with higher incomes register more positive ratings of the quality and coverage of their own healthcare."

https://news.gallup.com/poll/654044/view-healthcare-quality-...

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

#485

Post by epistasis »

nonfamous wrote: post #467
epistasis wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oddly enough the big rhetorical push against a universal system from prior decades was about "death panels" deciding what care somebody would get. And guess what's happened with insurance? Death panels! The propaganda spin on the health care system in the US has been on overdrive ever since Hillary Clinton wanted to implement some reforms in the 1990s, leading to absolutely massive resistance to any change whatsoever…

>>> And for most people, the healthcare system works fairly great. There are exceptions, like the denial described in this thread, and they usually get lots of attention because holy hell is that a messed up situation. But the everyday care that most people get is better than adequate. As an individual who has lived in multiple countries in three continents, I dispute that “the care most people get is better than ade…

While I don't doubt that there are endless stories of bad care, especially among the non-unionized working class, the bulk of voters with middle class lifestyles do have good care. Which is why it's so hard to make it into an issue that drives political change.

> there are plenty of studies that show that Americans have lower expected lifetimes than citizens of peer countries, despite much higher per-capita health care costs.

Americans aren't dying earlier of diseases that are solvable with a doctor visit, surgeries, pills, or other easy medical interventions. The medically related early deaths are primarily because of overnutrition and lack of exercise leading to pre-diabetes, diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease. That comes from public policy mandating car dependence throughout society and huge subsidization of empty calories in the food system. Overeating and lack of exercise are problems that have been stubbornly resistant to the medical system's efforts to change behavior. There's also other heightened early death risks like car crashes, drug overdoses, and suicide, but few of these deaths could be prevented by increased access to the medical system.

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

#486

Post by sxg »

throwforfeds wrote: post #473
Aurornis wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> University is expensive as fck. One thing that's hard to understand from the outside is that almost nobody actually pays those mind-blowing $60K/year tuition prices. US universities charge on a sliding scale based on the applicants' families' ability to pay. For an extreme example: Harvard's tuition is nominally $60K per year, but for families earning $200K or less it's $0. Many prestigious universities follow simi…

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 much worth the ROI.

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

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

#487

Post by hydrogen7800 »

nickff wrote: post #367
LeoPanthera wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is only ostensibly a democracy. It's not a functioning one, due to widespread voter disenfranchisement. Voter ID laws, voter roll purges, registration barriers, polling place accessibility, early and mail-in voting restrictions, and perhaps most importantly gerrymandering, misinformation, and intimidation all serve to reduce the power of the ballot box. And that's before we even get to US citizens in Puerto Ri…

Most other countries have voter ID, and the controversy surrounding it is puzzling to most foreigners. Additionally, parliamentary systems which result in majority governments are much more ‘dictatorship-like’ than the US system where individual representatives retain some autonomy.

A large number of Americans do not have ID's, which is strange to many people. If the need for voter ID and risk of fraud were so great, the efforts would be to make it trivial for these folks to get one, rather than preventing them from voting.

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

#488

Post by wouldbecouldbe »

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]

Well there is lot of shit we Europeans put up with, for instance EU moving court every few weeks voor 200m per year. But systems are hard to change.

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

#489

Post by throw310822 »

tonymet wrote: post #307
Workaccount2 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I had blood work done, my doctor and I decided on a set of cholesterol related markers beyond your typical cholesterol assay. It took me a week and hours of phone calls to figure out what would be covered, and how much the non-covered tests would cost. The doctor pointed at the lab, the lab pointed at insurance, insurance pointed at the doctor. Finally it was the lab that was able to produce numbers. And wh…

It’s just so insane that the entire industry accepts that no one knows how much things are. Even the “financial services” team will just say “yeah that estimate is wrong” and not blush. What are you guys all doing?

But then somehow they know how much things are when they send you the bill?

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

#490

Post by ayewo »

alistairSH wrote: post #125
LightBug1 wrote: post #90

Granted, $33k vs $195k is an excellent saving ... but $0k is what I, or my family, would pay. Which makes the cost seem insane by any measure.

On what basis are you refusing to pay? Services were rendered...

Services were rendered for just 4 hours is somehow worth $30k?
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