Losing a loved one is devastating enough. But for one individual on Threads, who goes by Nthmonkey, the heartbreak was followed by something even more shocking: a $195,000 hospital bill for just four hours of intensive care after their brother-in-law’s heart attack.
Insurance had lapsed two months prior, so the family expected a hefty out-of-pocket cost. But what landed in their mailbox was less medical bill and more financial ambush. Every line item was cryptic, vague categories like “Cardiology” slapped with five-figure sums. It was grief, confusion, and anger that rolled into one long invoice.
Most people would have written a cheque and tried to move on. But Nthmonkey did not. Instead, they turned to an unlikely ally, an AI chatbot named Claude.
After wrangling with hospital administrators to get a breakdown of services, Nthmonkey fed the details to the chatbot. AI dissected the billing codes line by line, and the results were surprising. The hospital had double-billed, charging for both master procedures and their individual components. Medicare would have rejected that instantly, yet the hospital had quietly slipped it in.
From $195,000 bill to $33,000
The chatbot also flagged improper coding, which marked emergency treatments as inpatient procedures and pointed out regulatory red flags, like billing for ventilator services during the same admission period. In short, the hospital had broken its own rules and hoped nobody would notice.
With the help of the AI chatbot, Nthmonkey fired off a series of crisp, legally toned letters threatening exposure, legal review, and bad press.
Suddenly, the hospital was far more eager to negotiate. When the dust settled, that towering $195,000 bill had shrunk to $33,000. “No one should ever pay more out of pocket than Medicare would pay. Not one cent,” Nthmonkey writes on Threads