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Comment by theptip | Hacker News Reader

This could be the thing that saves the US healthcare system; currently we pay 2x what a normal developed country would pay for the level of service provided, because there is a thick layer of paperwork, with insurance companies going back-and-forth with medical providers to debate and negotiate billing.

Imagine if AIs on each side could run that negotiation process in seconds, at the cost of merely a few hundred thousand OpenAI API calls. Then humans can get back to doing the actual work!

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LinkedIn proved that adding a tech layer that should get rid of an industry of paper shufflers is only profitable if those paper shufflers fund the platform.

Cue me skeptical that AI really reduces the middle-folk fees.

Better, more efficient technology rarely reduces the sticker price for customers. If the underlying product or service is cheaper to produce or provide, the price will stay the same (or increase) and the difference will be pocketed by shareholders. This is pretty much always what happens.

Same on the employee side. As an employee, if you adopt some technology that makes you 2X more productive, you're not going to get a 2X compensation increase. That delta will be captured and pocketed by the business.

This works only if everybody negotiates in good faith which isn't the case in the US system. Insurances deny legitimate claims, hospitals inflate prices as much as they can. You don't need AI to fix this. You just need more transparency and stable pricing. Hospitals need to stop making up cost but have stable pricing and insurances need to publish what they support and what they don't support.

Obviously this won't happen because there is way too much money to be made with the current state. If anything they will use AI to squeeze even more money from the patients. And employer based health insurance will keep patients captive.

> currently we pay 2x what a normal developed country would pay for the level of service provided, because there is a thick layer of paperwork, with insurance companies going back-and-forth with medical providers to debate and negotiate billing.

Oh, sweet summer child. We don't pay 2X because there's too much paperwork. There's too much paperwork because 2X spending can be used to justify a lot of paperwork. The delta in spending is due to the delta in pricing power that the US payer/provider complex has vs what is seen in other countries.

I don't think it is for the same level of service provided. I have read that there are three substantial differences between medical care in the USA and in other countries: 1. More single-patient rooms 2. More surgical procedures performed in the final year of life 3. More obesity and that the difference in the percentage of GDP spent on healthcare can at least partially be explained by these.

No, the big difference is higher prices for the same services. All the things you listed are just distractions that the industry and its water-carriers use.

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