I had an odd but successful experience with medical billing recently

as long as we have a significant portion of healthcare users who are basically fully price insensitive but not subject to any rationing, absurd US medical costs will continue.

> 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.

> had an odd but successful experience > we ended up paying $500 to the ambulance company I get where you’re coming from but that’s still a loss to me from the perspective of the broken system.

I hear you that you didn't have to pay something crazy but the fact that you ultimately paid $500 for a short ride and you think it was "successful experience" is how they fool us. You think you got a deal when they are still laughing all the way to the bank for charging you $500 for a short ride.

>While I am not surprised that such a service exists, what did surprise me is that it's just a division of my insurance company: they literally have a division that negotiates with another part of the insurance cmpany to get better coverage for patients. I was pretty lucky to notice the mail about this- there's nothing on my employer's site saying we have this coverage(!) and the vast majority of people in the US likely don't have this service. 100 years ago I used to work for the fruit company in phone support. My KPI's were 100% customer satisfaction. However, I needed to get approval from another team to advance any kind of free/gratis repairs replacements or gifts. That team's KPIs were opaque to me, but my understanding is that they were find as long as they offered some resistance. Between those two pillars we got a lot of good done for customers. I dont think theres anything neces…