4.8 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 1 November 2024
⏱️ 24 minutes
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Several listeners sent us an article with the headline Make your health insurance cry, about a new AI tool to fight health insurance. We had to learn more.
Meet Holden Karau: a Bay Area software engineer who says she’s “trying to make health insurance suck a little bit less.”
So she’s created an AI tool to appeal insurance denials.
Her project, Fight Health Insurance, is a labor of love (she’s not earning money from it) and fueled by hatred (of insurance companies).
It draws on her tech expertise and on her years of experience fighting health insurance: for gender-affirming care, for rehab after getting hit by a car, and even for her dog, Professor Timbit.
We talked with Holden about what it took to build the tool, how it works, and what she hopes comes next.
Here’s a transcript of this episode.
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0:00.0 | Hey, before we get started super quick, if you appreciate what we're doing here on an arm |
0:05.3 | and a leg, I want to ask you to help us out by donating to support the show. And I'm asking you |
0:11.0 | right now because right now, any money you give us gets matched dollar for dollar thanks to |
0:16.9 | newsmatch from the Institute for Nonprofit News. So you give us 50 bucks, they make it 100, |
0:22.2 | just like that. You can do that right now at arm and a leg show.com slash support. |
0:31.4 | Hey there. Let's start with introductions. My name is Carolyn D. Savon, and I have a super cute dog. His name is |
0:39.0 | Professor Timbitt. He's a professor because he's always researching something. My name is |
0:44.6 | Holden Caro, and I'm trying to make health insurance suck a little bit less. Carolyn and Holden |
0:50.1 | are married, and I talked with them in September because listeners had been sending me links |
0:55.3 | to a story from the San Francisco standard with the headline, Make Your Health Insurance Company |
1:01.4 | cry, one woman's fight to turn the tables on insurers. That woman was Holden. She works in |
1:07.9 | tech, and the story was about a tool she had built to help people fight |
1:11.1 | health insurance by writing appeal letters using AI, of course. She's made it available at a |
1:17.4 | website, Fighthealthinsurance.com. And I lose count of how many of you sent me that link, but |
1:24.1 | thank you so much. Holden and Carolyn live in San Francisco. I talked to them on |
1:30.5 | Zoom with a local reporter Lee Romney setting up mics for the two of them in their living room. |
1:35.9 | And the bookshelves I could see in the background had, along with books, lots of little stuffed |
1:40.9 | creatures. When I squinted, I could see a Pikachu. |
1:44.8 | So there's a few Pikachos, actually. |
1:48.1 | And we have a stuffed poop. |
1:51.8 | It's a wombat poop. |
1:53.9 | That's why it's square here. |
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