Can a bill for one patient be sent to their spouse? I don't understand how this even starts.
Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k
731–740 of 954 posts
Re: Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k
#732I 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…
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It's not a democracy. You were told wrong, it's a republic.
Re: Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k
#733For all my constant freak-outs about AI in general, it turned out to be a godsend last year when my wife’s mom was hospitalized (and later passed away a few weeks afterward). Multimodal ChatGPT had just become available on mobile, so being able to feed it photos of her vital sign monitors to figure out what was going on, have it translate what the doctors were telling us in real time, and explain things clearly made…
Doubters say it's not as accurate or could hallucinate. But the thing about hiring professionals is that you have to blindly trust them because you'd need to have a professional level of knowledge to qualify who is competent.
LLMs are a good way to double check if the service you're getting is about right or steer them onto the right hypothesis when they have some confirmation bias. This assumes that you know how to prompt it with plenty of information and open questions that don't contain leading presuppositions.
An LLM read my wife's blood lab results and found something the doctor was ignoring.
Re: Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k
#734Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Sure 92% of Americans have insurance, but they pay 5-10x the monthly premium compared to most Europeans and then on top of that the co-pay is thousands of dollars more than the small (or zero) amounts Europeans have. And insurance is not guaranteed, it's all linked to your employer. It's bad for nearly everyone, but enough people accept it so it doesn't change.
Americans still have higher take home pay and lower cost of living than Europeans. You also need to understand that the 22% who have full free coverage pay nothing, and because of their income also don't pay taxes.
There are also subsidies for middle-low earners, and most full time jobs offer insurance (which people foolishly wave to save a few bucks, but end up being another horror story).
The situation is not nearly as dire as the young American crowd that dominates social media makes it out to be. It could be much better, but as I alluded to in my other comment, don't let stories of car crashes scare you from getting a license.
Re: Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k
#735Amazing story. And if Anthropic is really in it for humanity and spreading good, they’ll productize this for all of us to drive efficiency!
Or, more likely, they’ll just sell enterprise products to wealthy hospitals and look the other way.
Re: Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k
#736Earlier quoted context omitted.
> we ended up paying $500 to the ambulance company. I'm sure people from first world countries would be stunned by this number. And that makes it even sadder. > Maybe AI will help, but I really doubt it long term. I'm guessing it will help up until the point where hospitals start using AI for this process.
The idea of an injured patient having to pay at all for an emergency ambulance ride to a hospital should stun any normal human being living in a civilized society.
Then who pays? If your argument is that we should socialize the cost of that ambulance ride across all Americans, they won’t go for that. Americans don’t want more taxes, but more importantly, Americans deeply mistrust their fellow citizens, and don’t want to feel like they’re paying for someone else’s life decisions.
America doesn’t have the same kind of social cohesion as most countries. We’re a nation of individualists. The general feeling here (rightly or wrongly) is that healthcare costs are largely driven by your choices in life, and Americans don’t want to feel like they’re on the hook for other people’s bad choices.
Re: Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k
#737Earlier quoted context omitted.
So build faster and better than YC to defend society|humanity against YC portfolio companies (not all, of course, just the harmful ones) until politics can close the gap. There is no speed limit. There is no moat. The only thing you don't have is ~$500k in investment [1]. Constraint breeds creativity. Be creative, stay curious. [1] https://www.ycombinator.com/deal
It's very hard to believe that a company setting out to fight against one of the major "legs" of the stool of the US Economy is going to be playing on a level playing field against companies whose mission is to strengthen those legs. Even if the business idea is sound. There's simply too much money and power wrapped up in ensuring healthcare remains a money sponge that soaks the public. A company fighting that will n…
I never said it would be a company, or a business. You might call it a project, an effort, or something similar. The name is not important, only if it is achieving its target outcome.
Re: Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k
#738Earlier quoted context omitted.
Software I write at work is not artistic expression yet is covered by copyright. This isn't a counter argument, just pointing out how absurd copyright is.
Your software is definitely artistic expression. You signed over the rights to those expressions to your employer. (IANAL)
Always disappointing to hear creative writers denigrate their craft just because their main audience happens to be computers.
Re: Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k
#739Earlier quoted context omitted.
Consider these thoughts: https://wiki.c2.com/?SoftwareIsArt
Our role as programmers being closer to artists than engineers does not make code closer to paintings than bridges. We do have highly repeatable patterns. Nearly every program can be essentially boiled down to some subset of CRUD + tranformation. Even if it is art (I'm not convinced), the recent artificial scarcity on art is absurd. Some other thoughts to consider: - https://drewdevault.com/2020/08/24/Alice-in-Wonder…
I've never seen a bridge I wouldn't consider a work of art either.
Re: Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k
#740Earlier quoted context omitted.
>the median American family is probably better off under this system than they would be under any of the European-style systems: the wage premium enjoyed by many Americans and the lower tax level offsets the cost of insurance and copays. If you had said the median tech worker? I might have believed you, but the median family? No way.
The median family of 4 with private health insurance has a household income of around $115k not counting the gross cost of their employer-provided health care. Remember: being on private insurance puts you in a cohort that: * Excludes everybody on Medicaid * Excludes fixed-income seniors on Medicare * Makes it overwhelmingly likely you have subsidized employer-covered health insurance. Figure your employer "covers" h…
You’re moving the goalposts. How many families have private insurance? Considering both families with and without private insurance, is the median family better off in the US?