If I sound like I'm defending the morality of the hospital for billing a private individual $190k for services they'd expect to be paid $37k for, please know that I'm not. But it helps to understand WHY the hospital billed that much, and whether it's legal for the hospital to bill that much.

The biggest semantic "mistake" the author makes in their thread is saying, "Claude figured out that the biggest rule for Medicare was that one of the codes meant all other procedures and supplies during the encounter were unbillable."

The Medicare rule does not make those codes "unbillable" - it makes them unreimburseable.

The hospital can both bill Medicare for a bigger procedure code, and the individual components of that procedure, but Medicare is gonna say, "Thanks for the bill, you're only entitled to be paid for the bigger procedure code, not the stuff in there."

Neither the FBI nor Medicare is gonna go after the hospital for submitting covered procedure codes and individual codes that are unreimbursable under those procedure codes. That's not crime, that's just medical billing.

Actual double billing would occur if, say, your insurnace paid the hospital for a procedure, and then they came after you for more money, or billed a secondary insurance for the same procedure. Or if they'd said, "Oh no, the OP's brother in law wasn't here for just 4-hours, they were here overnight so now we're billing for that as well."

NOW - a much better way for the hospital to handle this scenario would be to see that the patient is cash-pay, and then have separate cash-pay rates that they get billed that essentially mirror Medicare reimbursement. That's essentially what the author got them to do, and it absolutely sucks that's what he had to do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Scott