PwC Report: AI Making Medical Bills Higher | Hacker News Reader

PwC Report: AI Making Medical Bills Higher

fortune.com

80 pointskarakoram21 comments

In short: AI-based tools tend to "upcode" cases and bill for more serious conditions, and more expensive treatment.

(This is not about AI costing too much.)

Gee. I wonder why that would be allowed to happen.

Seems to me shady providers were already highly skilled in upcoming without AI or any other technology…

And we were able to able to kill people with projectiles before we had guns but ffs we don't use that to shut down every conversation about what guns can do.

AI does exactly what the owner (like employer) wants it to do.

Clearly the fault is with AI. That's the only possible explanation.

No technology will make it cheaper for YOU, just improve margins for the chain of fleecing between provider and insurance. Demand for healthcare is inelastic like water or air, so they can charge whatever they want and you pay or die. AI will of course amplify your costs while improving their profits.

What's terrifying is that European countries which had a chance to create universal healthcare during last decades, instead aimlessly drift toward "American model". When medical professionals see the money involved in America the temptation is simply too big. They basically monetize pain and fear of dying, no professional medical treatment is offered. Greed is such a universal and strong feeling.

What? This is also totally not true. Look at the results in treatment outcomes even over the past 10 years. You are getting more and better healthcare, for more money.

More money sucks, but it's not like there's nothing in return.

This is on the edge of treatments - but everything is more expensive. Primary care, bandaids at the clinic, everything.

Even then the advanced cares profitability is extraordinary. There are many examples but take Benlysta. It was developed with federal funding (my money) as the first new lupus treatment in 50 years. Wonderful. But it is priced at $36k/y for self injection. It’s been that price for 10 years. It costs them dollars per injection to produce it. This is definitely a great advancement, but it was highly subsidized, doesn’t cost anything near the amount to produce, and because they have a captive market, they have no inventive to produce a next generation. They just sit on the patents until they near expiration and renew under some minor modification indefinitely.

This isn’t just one case. It plays out across all the advanced health care.

I would say overall healthcare in the US is NOT better than it was 50 years ago. Specialists take months to see, primary care if offered is a month out. Many regions have no health care, similar to how it was 100 years ago. Doctors are harried, most replaced by PAs, many are directed in care by private equity savings schemes. Medical bankruptcy didn’t exist when I grew up, we had a public healthcare system, etc. Advanced treatments for cancer and difficult conditions are absolutely better - but that’s an investment in medical research. The medical SYSTEM is an absolute tire fire.

Insurance companies spend a lot of time on bill review and disputes over coding. They will develop an adversarial AI process to counteract this (assuming they haven't already). Race to the bottom and we all win

https://archive.md/17Bsx

Why is medical even a for profit system?

I want to say because the people in the US vote for it, but I am not sure that is the actual case.

Because it's useful to leverage capitalist greed to invest in expensive and risky medical research, and have surplus medical capacity paid for by people that have extra wealth and are willing to pay for extra care.

The issues arise when there isn't a sufficient public system taking the bulk of the demand, giving people options and a floor to the quality and utility of the private system.

Just wait until we deploy the AI to optimise healthcare so that people die right at retirement age to maximise tax extraction and minimise healthcare usage

Ye olde cyberpunk kill switch, are your teched out goons out of date? Flush em and print new better goons fresh from the vats!

This reads like slop.

The four emboldened headings that make up the whole article sound like they’re straight outta chatgpt:

* what happened

* the devil is in the billing details

* the big but

* bottom line

I’m not sure that I’ve ever read a Fortune article before so maybe this is just their style. But I doubt it.

They might have a skill or something that goes from report -> 'fortune article' - it honestly would not surprise me.

Peruse tvtropes.com enough, and you will realize that nothing is ever original, everything follows this or that long-established pattern, and complaining about that is another old trope.

More seriously, I like the fact that articles follow a particular scheme: the problem, exposition, conflict, contemplation. Much like a scientific article follows a similar established pattern.

And emotionally now: complaints about slop are often as schematic as the slop.

> And emotionally now: complaints about slop are often as schematic as the slop.

ah, the ol' "I'm rubber, you're glue" approach to solving problems. Worked so well for our billionairs and politicians, we should apply it to every interaction in our daily lives.

This story was republished by Fortune from a partnership with Tech Brew: https://www.techbrew.com/stories/ai-healthcare-bills-increas...

If you look at other stories by the same author, such as this one https://www.techbrew.com/stories/openai-token-price-wars-ant... - the "TL;DR", "What happened", "Bottom line" format is consistent across their work. It looks to me like a style guide thing, not necessarily something introduced by LLMs.

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