America is known for its sky high medical bills compared to other leading nations that have nationalized healthcare, yet these ballooning costs could be made a lot easier to stomach thanks to newly available AI tools.
Even simple things like taking an ambulance or getting seen by a doctor can set you back thousands of dollars, and any major medical care can genuinely be life altering from a financial perspective, even with health insurance.
For most Americans there isn't really a way around this outside of simply not needing to go to the hospital, yet one family who recently lost someone found out that artificial intelligence can actually help you out.
As reported by Tom's Hardware, one person has explained in a lengthy post on Threads how they managed to significantly reduce the hospital bills incurred after their brother-in-law passed away, and it was all thanks to one particular AI tool.
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Shared by nthmonkey, the post reveals that their brother-in-law died from a heart attack in June after just four hours in the hospital, and he had unfortunately let his insurance policy lapse two months prior.
The final hospital bill they received came to a total of $195,000, which is eye-watering to say the least, and even with categorization it made little sense. They finally managed to get a bill complete with itemized CPT codes, but that was still confusing to comprehend and work out where money could perhaps be saved.
At a loss and looking for anything they could use to help, they finally turned to AI, using Anthropic's popular Claude tool to provide some assistance.
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"I fed the itemized bill and codes to Claude (AI). Claude figured out that the biggest rule for Medicare was that one of the codes meant all other procedures and supplies during the encounter were unbillable. So the hospital had billed us for the master procedure and then again for every component of it."
You can probably understand that this was quite a big deal that they would have otherwise had no way of figuring out, and it worked out to be "over a hundred grand of cost that Medicare would have reimbursed zero dollars for."
On top of this, they had also been billed for something that quite literally never happened, and a number of contradictions in the rules of medical billing that weren't picked up when the final total was sent over.
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Upon being informed of these discrepancies the hospital suggested that they apply for charity assistance, but the family wanted to fight this and do it right, and they eventually reached a result they were happy with.
"We said we weren't looking for charity, we were negotiating price and we had caught them in a bad place that they couldn't defend in court or in public. Don't make threats you aren't willing to following through on. We were. And it worked. They came back and asked for $37k," nthmonkey explained.
It shouldn't be this hard and you shouldn't need AI tools to work out where you're effectively being scammed, but the poster's 'lesson' from this is that you should fight when you can, and fight with knowledge.
Additionally, some people might be reluctant to fork out $20 a month for a subscription service like Claude but in this case it has saved more than you can imagine, and the difference between the two medical bills would be enough to pay for the AI for the next 658 years.