Man brilliantly finds legal loophole to save his money after being billed for insurance incorrectly

Laws are an essential part of making sure corporations run legitimately and treat employees fairly. However, these laws can sometimes be used by companies to unnecessarily slow down certain processes and then it becomes a pain to employees. Reddit user, u/Cowlthor, experienced a similar situation when they were involved in a brutal car accident in 2021. The post has gained 5.6K upvotes on the site with 213 comments.

The individual had to stay in the hospital for five days after the crash happened. They state that they had to undergo months of physical therapy and consult a lot of specialists to get their body back in shape. They write, "Most of the time, getting records, setting appointments, pre-authorization, or anything related to my care was simple and didn't involve much and almost always could be authorized by my name and birthdate."

But, it turned out that the individual was being billed from the hospital instead of their healthcare provider. So, they decided to call their provider and clear it up. They get on call with customer support and say, "I recently got care from X person at X location and there was some incorrect billing, so I am being billed for it and not the insurance company." The person on the customer care call said that they could not speak to the individual about the matter and asked for their name and birth date.

The individual was taken aback by their reply and inquired why it was so. They replied, "I am only authorized to talk to an attorney about this matter." The individual tactfully replied that they would be representing themselves for all legal matters. Upon hearing this, the other person on call suddenly went silent and asked them for a moment.

They write, "I get put on hold for about 3 minutes and when they come back, we get straight to discussing my issue and get it quickly resolved." The individual finished the post by stating how they probably expected them to call later with an attorney and was surprised by their quick reply to represent themselves. People on the site loved the individual's witty response and shared their support in the comments section.

u/justaman_097 commented, "Well played. These people came to play checkers with you and you kicked it up to chess!" Another person, u/Zoreb1, pointed out, "Things must be so bad at that place if they expect a call to be from the lawyers. The problem of errors in medical billing is something that has persisted in the American healthcare system for quite some time. According to Gitnux, 80% of medical bills contain some kind of error, out of which 25% come about because of typos.

It also comes about due to hospital coding mistakes (63%) and a lack of precision in clinical documentation (44%). As a result of these errors, 35% of medical bills end up being unpaid, which is a problem considering the fact that most of these are $100 on average.