I usually read Hacker News, not comment...this story just grabbed my attention because of my kid's situation and wanting to maybe give others hope fighting a similar battle.
You know, when you deal with the past 18 months where your kid has 6 hospitalizations due to illness, 2 minor surgeries, 3 major surgeries (this last one was spine related, others heart), countless appointments, multiple feeding tube feedings a day to sustain nutrition, nearly $2 million lifetime billed do insurance (as a 6 year old)...who the fuck cares about what gender I decide to write about or the reason I might not share it?
This wasn't an immediate ER situation, at least directly (yet). More of a if this procedure doesn't get done now, at some point in the relatively near future, there will be multiple ER situations, almost certainly multiple hospitalizations, and one of those might go past the point of no return.
And the insurance still played games. Like, it's in your best interest to pay once and get this situation resolved in a scheduled/controlled manner than wait for multiple emergency hospitalizations AND have to pay for this in an emergency situation...you're probably talking at least 2x cost if not more.
I fought insurance over this past summer after they declined covering a life saving surgery for my 6-year-old child at the last minute. We were in despair that my child's life was at risk each day we waited because of insurance incompetence.
ChatGPT literally guided me through the whole external appeal process, who to contact outside of normal channels to ask for help / apply pressure, researched questions I had, helped with wording on the appeals, and yes, helped keep me pushing forward at some of the darkest moments when I was grasping for anything, however small, to help keep the pressure up on the insurance company.
I didn't follow everything it suggested blindly. Definitely decided a few times to make decisions that differed from its advice partially or completely, and I sometimes ran suggested next steps by several close friends/family to make sure I wasn't missing something obvious. But the ideas/path ChatGPT suggested, the chasing down different scenarios to rule in/out them, and coaching me through this is what ultimately got movement on our case.
10 days post denial, I was able to get the procedure approved from these efforts.
21 days post denial and 7 days after the decision was reversed, we lucked into a surgery slot that opened up and my child got their life saving surgery. They have recovered and is in the best health of the past 18 months.
This maybe isn't leveling the playing field, at least not entirely. But it gave us a fighting chance on a short timeline and know where to best use our pressure. The hopeful part of me is that many others can use similar techniques to win.
I been lazy and was using Cloudflare's resolver only recently. In hindsight I probably should just setup two instances of Unbound on my home network that don't rely on upstream resolvers and call it a day. It's unlikely both will go down at the same time and if I'm having an total Internet outage (unlikely as I have Comcast as primary + T-Mobile Home Internet as a backup), it doesn't matter if DNS is or isn't resolving.