Your Medical Bills Are (Probably) Wrong. Here’s How to Fight Back.

A few years ago, my doctor billed me for two visits on the same day. There’d only been one.

I called the office. The billing clerk said the $150 additional charge was for the doc’s time “reviewing my chart” and doing research before and after the appointment. I told her I thought the charge was excessive.

Her response surprised me: “How much do you think it should be?” I told her $75 seemed fair to me.

Full disclosure: I pulled this number out of my ass.

The clerk knew that the original $150 was also the product of “rectal linear extraction” — and she knew I knew. She agreed to cut the charge in half.

That’s how I learned that medical bills are sometimes negotiable.

Turns out they are also often wrong.

I intend to be a little less trusting of my providers after reading Kim Komando’s Up To 80% Of Medical Bills Have Errors. AI Can Spot Them In Minutes.*

Komando, a longtime radio and podcast host who focuses on the tech world, tells the story of a man who suffered a fatal heart attack. His family received a bill for over $195,000 from the hospital. The man’s brother-in-law called the billing office.

He requested an itemized bill with CPT codes (the universal billing codes hospitals use) and fed the whole thing into Claude, an AI chatbot.

Within minutes, Claude found duplicate charges, services billed as “inpatient” even though the patient was never admitted, supply costs inflated 500% to 2,300% above Medicare rates and charges for procedures that never happened. He cross-checked with ChatGPT. Both AIs agreed. He wrote a six-page letter citing every violation by name.

After receiving the challenge and documentation, the hospital reduced the bill by 83% — saving the family over $160,000.

The Financial Double Whammy of Parkinson’s

Families dealing with Parkinson’s often have unexpected financial pressures coming from two sources:

1. Lost wages due to missed work and forced early retirement.

2. Crushing medical expenses, often exacerbated by billing errors.

These factors are nothing new. But it’s been up to us to go through each bill line by line — without any training on what to look for — and then figure out how to challenge any error we are lucky enough to find.

What’s new is the availability of AI tools to combat improperly high bills. AI can quickly identify the errors and help us implement a strategy to challenge them — and do it for free.

Here’s what Komando recommends:

Step 1: Call your provider and request an itemized bill with CPT codes. Not the summary. The full line-by-line breakdown. You’re legally entitled to this.

Step 2: Open ChatGPT, Claude, Grok or Gemini (free versions work) and paste this:

“I’m pasting my itemized medical bill below. Please: (1) Explain every charge in plain English, (2) Flag any duplicate or suspicious charges, (3) Compare each charge to average costs, (4) Identify billing code errors or bundling violations, and (5) Draft a dispute letter I can send to the billing department. Here’s my bill:”

Step 3: Paste your bill. The AI will translate every line and tell you what looks wrong.

Step 4: If the AI finds errors (it probably will), call the billing department and ask for a supervisor. Reference the specific codes. Hospitals resolve disputes all the time when patients show up prepared.

Have you challenged a medical bill, with or without AI? How’d it go? Please drop your story in the Comments.

*BTW, Komando’s “80% error rate” claim may also have been rectally-generated, although not by her. I found the same figure on several older web pages; none of them cited a source. So maybe the error rate is 63%, or 47%, or 92%. Regardless, everyone seems to agree there are a lot of mistakes.

Paraquat Update: Syngenta Caves

Last week I wrote about Syngenta, a major producer of the herbicide paraquat. I wondered aloud how their 53,000 employees could justify working for a company whose product likely causes Parkinson’s.

This week, Syngenta announced that it will stop manufacturing paraquat by the end of June.

This is a big victory for the good guys.

“If this is true, then fewer people are going to develop Parkinson’s disease in the future,” said Ray Dorsey, a neurologist and director of the Atria Research Institute’s Center for the Brain and the Environment, a non-profit research initiative investigating the environmental causes of brain diseases.

“It also means that the voices of the Parkinson’s community, the voices of those who’ve been highlighting the toxic effects of this weed killer … are being heard and they’re having an impact,” he said.

But the fight’s not over. There are other companies still making generic versions of the stuff. In the absence of a formal ban, those who live and work around farms are still at high risk.

Your state legislators and congresspeople still need to hear from you. And so does the Administrator of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin, who can be reached at zeldin.lee@epa.gov.

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Bonus for Those Who Read to the Bottom

Gabe Lee turns “I Will Survive” into a minor-key folk ballad.

From the Lawrence Welk Show, a perky take on the Everly Brothers’ “Bye Bye Love.” Particularly notable is the surprising-for-1974 gender choice in the verse.