![]() ![]() Wright said the Affordable Care Act provided some protection for people, such as banning annual and lifetime limits on coverage and capping out-of-pocket maximums. “Medical problems and medical bills are very likely to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back of a family’s finances,” said Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access California, a health care consumer advocacy organization. She liked Better’s service so much that she continues to use it and has recommended it to others.Įxperts agree that consumers need help tackling costly and complicated medical bills. ![]() “I didn’t really want to sit on hold for the rest of my life,” said Brezinski, 28. She had put off the task partly because she knew it would be a headache to spend hours on interminable phone calls, she said. Kristin-Leigh Brezinski, who works for a small tech company in Seattle, said she started using Better to address a pile of therapy bills she’d been meaning to submit for reimbursement. Adding insult, these bills often start to pile up while patients are still at their lowest - either dealing with serious medical issues, or just beginning to recover. The emergence of these businesses reflects the fact that medical billing is a complicated, often byzantine process that can mystify even the savviest consumers. Subscribe to KHN's free Morning Briefing. “You can’t automate repeated phone calls to a guy in a basement who doesn’t want to do his job,” said Victor Echevarria, whose company, Remedy Labs, folded two years after he founded it. Pairing a technological solution with an industry that still uses faxes, distant call centers and snail-mailed bills can prove challenging. Some of the young companies are flourishing. ![]() Each has taken on a different aspect of billing - helping patients file claims, scanning bills for errors or making charges easier to understand.īut in their quest to revolutionize an industry, these start-ups face a variety of obstacles, including trouble getting access to medical records and difficulty cracking complex insurance policies. “For a lot of people, it becomes magic that we’re able to solve those problems and get them the money they are owed from insurance,” said Norman, who founded Oakland-based Better about a year and a half ago.īetter is among a new breed of start-ups trying to lead customers through the labyrinth of medical billing. Unlike visiting in-network doctors, patients using out-of-network services often must pay upfront, then ask for reimbursement from their insurer later. The majority of Better’s customers have Preferred Provider Organizations (PPOs) or other types of insurance policies with out-of-network benefits. The company has processed millions of dollars in claims, for everything from psychiatry to acupuncture to contact lenses, Norman said. Better’s employees navigate the bureaucratic thicket to track down reimbursements - and keep 10 percent of the money they recover from insurers. Today, Norman’s clients submit digital copies of their out-of-network bills through an app on their phones. She and other entrepreneurs wondered: Why not medical bills? Banking, transportation, furniture and grocery shopping can all be managed with some fancy finger work on smartphone screens. Norman said her company, Better, along with a handful of other Silicon Valley start-ups, is attempting to usher medical billing technology into the 21st century.
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