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Comment by triangleman | Hacker News Reader

Where is the startup helping me to decode my medical bills?

How would knowing the meaning and even the average cost for a given code change your behavior? It's still basically impossible to get even an estimate of cost for even the most basic medical procedures before having one.

Also, the bills are much more complicated than what they print out and mail to you. The amounts can vary based on many different factors, such as BMI, alcohol/nicotine dependency, and other risk factors that make you more risky to provide care for.

You sound like an insurance company talking.

Not exactly, but I am quite familiar with the issues involved. My point is that we need to make shopping and selection easier and better, instead of focusing on what all you were billed for. If we fix that problem, the most important part aspect of the bills is that they are close to the estimate. The health system as a whole is moving away from billing from individual services anyways, hopefully that will continue.

Why would it need to change your behaviour - if your paying for something surely you have a right to have the bill explained to you and for you to be able to challenge individual items?

[NB I'm from the UK so I have no idea how medical billing works. But I do have plenty experience with lawyers and I know that getting a details breakdown of work charged is a really good idea.]

Well, at the point that you have a bill, you are kinda beholden to the people that sent it. You can't easily dispute a charge with our system. It would definitely be useful to understand the bill later on, if you could actually do something about it. My point is not being able to know the estimated charge before you choose a provider makes it impossible for the market to work, because competition can't happen, at least not with costs.

Exactly what I was thinking. It could be a simple app that you take a photo of your itemised medical bill and it decodes it for you. Although after reading this, I think an app that does this automatically would fail as itemised bills do not seem to be the norm and even when you ask for one, nothing makes sense and there appears to be a lack of standardisation.

I think insurance companies should offer this as a value-add. A broken down, item-by-item explanation of what you were charged for and what it means.

I don't think its that simple, the myriad of billing formats would be problematic. That said, a credit karma like service to connect with your insurance company could be a lot less problematic IMO to implement.

It's because the myriad formats are problematic that this would make for a good startup. And you could initially schlep it: as new formats come in, do just-in-time research to figure it all out.

Here: https://www.copatient.com

I have no affiliation with the company; I'm just a fan of their work.

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