[whiddershins]

I don’t understand this at all. My understanding is that in New York State a healthcare provider cannot bill you over your insurance.

Once they agree to take your insurance you are liable for out of pocket or copays as per your agreement with your insurance company.

Unless you deliberately go to a doctor who doesn’t take insurance, which is generally only something very wealthy people do.

What situation is this attempting to address?

Edit: I’ve read the explanation in more detail above and I still don’t get it.

[kchiu20]

Great question! So particularly if you have a high deductible health plan (which has become the most popular plan for Americans over the last decade) or a plan with a copay that doesn't cover every service (which is most plans), it's common to receive unexpected medical bills.

A simple example for me is I had a high deductible health plan (while working as a software engineer at Uber) where I went to see a dermatologist to remove a wart, but I had no idea how much it would cost until weeks or months after the visit. It turns out that cost of seeing a dermatologist and getting liquid nitrogen treatment can vary by hundreds of dollars depending on where you go, even if you use your insurance.

So Certainly shows you the upfront price that is specific to your insurance and lets you compare prices across providers. And if you book through us, you don't need to worry about surprise bills since we guarantee that you won't owe more than the prices we show upfront.

[whiddershins]

What’s odd is I think you might provide 90% of the value by just taking over the role of disputing random illegitimate bills.

The majority of surprise bills are errors and stuff that verges in fraud. And even though the patient doesn’t legally owe it, they may not understand this and even if they do it is super stressful.

At minimum it is a time consuming nuisance to respond to all the random BS bills.

I feel like you could accomplish that with a tiny fraction of the infrastructure.