There is a lot of controversy around the use of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in the writing community, but this post isn’t about the ethics and aesthetics of using AI for creative writing. It’s about the use of AI for more practical concerns—like researching government regulations and interpreting them so the average person can understand them. It’s also about how AI can help an ordinary person navigate a complicated bureaucracy.
Recently, AI saved me over $1,000.
Early this year, my husband was in the hospital for an extended period, then transferred to a rehabilitation facility. Because he had significant mobility problems, the hospital arranged for an ambulance to take him to the rehab center. I assumed Medicare would pay for the ambulance because the hospital had determined that an ambulance was the appropriate way to transport him.
I was wrong.
When the bill arrived from the ambulance company, I discovered Medicare had denied the claim. I hadn’t heard from Medicare yet, so I called the ambulance company and asked why Medicare had denied the trip. They told me it was because the trip wasn’t an emergency and was deemed not medically necessary.
I was surprised. From my perspective, it certainly had been medically necessary. My husband had spent a month in the hospital. He had difficulty walking and needed rehabilitation. And on the day of the transfer, his Parkinson’s medications weren’t working well, and he was having significant tremors. Putting him into a car and expecting him to manage the trip that way didn’t seem reasonable to me.
So I decided to appeal the denial.
I spent much of my career as an attorney responding to government agencies on various matters. I know that it’s important to use language they understand and to organize the information in a way that is persuasive. But in this case, I didn’t know Medicare’s rules for ambulance coverage, and I didn’t know how to translate my husband’s situation into an argument that would satisfy Medicare claims managers.
That’s where AI came in.
First, I did some research, asking common-language questions of Google’s Gemini. I learned some of the terminology around what Medicare considers medically necessary and what it does not.
After probing AI for a while, I asked Gemini to draft a letter of appeal for me. I gave it the facts of my husband’s situation and asked it to present the case for why Medicare should determine that his ambulance transport was medically necessary.
The first draft of the resulting letter wasn’t perfect. In fact, some of the details were wrong. It needed heavy editing. But the AI draft gave me a starting point. It was much easier to edit the letter than to draft it from scratch.
I’d estimate that the first draft gave me about 80 percent of what I needed. It helped me understand the issues I needed to address, and it organized the information I needed to give Medicare into a logical format. I spent some time correcting the facts and adding details specific to my husband’s situation. Once I was satisfied that the letter was accurate, I filed the appeal.
And it worked.
Medicare accepted the ambulance claim and paid its portion of the cost. Our secondary insurance also paid its share. The bill had been over $1000, so I was pleased.
I’m not suggesting that AI should replace lawyers, doctors, insurance experts, or other professionals. And I certainly wouldn’t recommend trusting an AI-generated document without checking it carefully. But this experience taught me that using AI can yield practical results. In my case, it taught me what I needed to know, organized the information I needed to present, and gave me a leg up on drafting the appropriate response. AI didn’t win my appeal for me, but it sure saved me time in making the appeal.
What have you used AI for that yielded positive results?
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