Frequently asked questions

MediBill Saver reads any medical bill you upload — hospital, ER, lab, ambulance, clinic, or pharmacy — and cross-references every charge against six federal data sources. It surfaces patterns associated with potential billing errors, such as ER visits coded at higher levels than the documented care, charges that may have been unbundled, items priced well above public benchmarks, and duplicate line items. For each issue, it drafts a ready-to-customize dispute letter with the relevant procedure codes and federal-law citations already inside.

The CMS Physician Fee Schedule (Medicare-allowed rates for ~10,000 procedure codes); NADAC, the federal pharmacy acquisition cost benchmark; Hospital Price Transparency files (every hospital is required to publish their cash-pay and insurance-negotiated rates under 45 CFR §180.50); the CMS National Correct Coding Initiative bundling rules; CMS Hospital Compare for facility quality and patient-experience metrics; and IRS Publication 78 to confirm 501(c)(3) status for charity-care eligibility.

Most bills complete the screening in about 60 seconds after upload. Larger or multi-page hospital itemized bills can take longer. The free preview shows the severity score and headline numbers immediately; the full line-item breakdown and dispute letters are unlocked after payment.

Any consumer medical bill: emergency department visits, hospital inpatient and outpatient, urgent care, primary care, specialist visits, surgical bills, lab work, imaging, anesthesia, ambulance and air-ambulance, pharmacy charges, and durable medical equipment. The audit works best on itemized bills that show CPT or HCPCS codes on every line. Hospital summary bills (UB-04 forms, common at discharge) show category totals like "Intensive Care" or "Pharmacy" without per-line codes — for those, the cash-pay, insurance, and Medicare benchmark columns will show a dash and the audit focuses on documenting the total billed and drafting the HIPAA §164.524 itemized-statement request letter that legally compels your hospital to send the detailed bill within 30 days. Once that detailed version arrives, you can re-upload it for the full line-by-line audit. The re-upload is a separate $19.97 audit; if you anticipate multiple audits, Family Plan ($97/mo, 10 audits) is the cheaper path.

The Medicare-allowed rate for any given CPT code is published by CMS quarterly and is exact to the cent for the national average. Hospital-specific rates from Hospital Price Transparency files are exact for the hospitals that have published machine-readable data; for facilities without published data, we fall back to Medicare-anchored estimates (typically 1.0–1.2× for cash-pay and 1.8× for commercial-insurance rates) and label every estimate clearly as an estimate. The dispute letters cite the underlying data source on every benchmark so the billing department can verify it.

Patient advocates are humans who do the work for you — read the bill, call the hospital, negotiate, and represent you. They typically charge $500–1,500 per bill or a percentage of savings. MediBill Saver is software you use yourself: it does the bill review and drafts the letters, but you sign and mail them. It costs $19.97 per bill instead of hundreds. It's the right fit when you're comfortable handling your own paperwork and want the analysis done quickly. A human advocate is the right fit when the situation is complex, contested, or you simply prefer someone else to handle it.

$19.97 for a single bill audit, one-time, with a 30-day money-back guarantee. The Family Plan is $97 per month for 10 audits per cycle; the Pro Plan is $297 per month for 100 audits per cycle. Both subscription plans cancel anytime with no contract; future renewals stop at the end of the current billing period.

Yes. The single-bill audit ($19.97) is backed by a 30-day money-back guarantee. To request a refund, email billing@medibillsaver.com within 30 days of purchase with the subject 'Refund Request' and include the email used at purchase, the last four digits of the card, the payment date, and the dollar amount. Approved refunds are processed within 10 business days. The Family Plan and Pro Plan are cancel-anytime; past monthly payments are not refundable.

No. The single-bill audit is a one-time $19.97 charge, no subscription, no card-on-file. The subscription plans show their full monthly price up front. Affiliates earn a referral commission paid by us, not added to your bill. There are no fees for emailing your audit, downloading the PDF, or generating the dispute letters.

Every uploaded bill gets a free preview that includes the severity score (1–10), the total billed amount, the estimated total potential savings, and the count of flagged line items. The detailed line-item breakdown, the financial-assistance program list, and the up-to-five dispute letters are unlocked at the $19.97 paywall.

No. The bill is processed in-memory during the analysis call and is not persisted to our servers. The unlocked report is encrypted in your browser and the decryption key is only released after a verified Stripe payment. We never see your credit card number — Stripe handles all payment processing.

No. HIPAA covers medical providers, insurers, and their business associates. MediBill Saver is consumer self-help software: you are the data subject and you consent to the processing you request. We treat your data with HIPAA-aligned care anyway — no retention, encrypted in transit, encrypted at rest until your payment unlocks it — but the legal status is consumer software.

No. The bill is sent to Google Gemini's paid API tier for analysis only — that contract prohibits training on your input. We do not share data with hospitals, insurers, or marketing partners. We do not maintain a customer profile that could be sold or correlated.

We have a separate Consumer Health Data Privacy Notice that addresses Washington MHMDA specifically. The short version: we don't collect or sell consumer health data as defined by the Act, and you have the right to delete any data we may hold. See /consumer-health-privacy for the full policy.

Up to five letters per bill, depending on what's appropriate to your situation: an itemized-statement request under HIPAA §164.524, a line-by-line dispute citing the federal benchmarks, a charity-care application under ACA §501(r) for non-profit hospitals, a No Surprises Act notice under 42 USC §300gg-111 for surprise out-of-network charges, an insurance appeal for denied or underpaid claims, a debt validation request under FDCPA §1692g if the bill has gone to collections, and a settlement offer for self-pay or post-collection negotiation.

No. You sign and mail the letters yourself. Each letter has bracketed placeholders for your name, address, account number, and date of service that you fill in before printing. We recommend mailing by certified mail with return receipt so you have proof of delivery. The letters cite the relevant federal statute and request a specific written response within 30 calendar days.

Federal law requires the provider to place the account in dispute status and respond in writing within 30 calendar days for HIPAA §164.524 itemized requests and for No Surprises Act disputes; charity-care decisions are typically returned within 30–60 days. If the provider does not respond, the dispute letter names specific oversight bodies you can escalate to: your state Attorney General, CMS, the IRS for §501(r) violations at non-profit hospitals, your state Department of Insurance, and the BBB.

Federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau guidance treats medical debt under dispute differently from settled debt. As of 2024, paid medical debt and disputed medical debt under $500 do not appear on consumer credit reports, and many medical collection accounts are excluded from FICO and VantageScore models. Sending a written dispute and following up in writing creates a paper trail that protects your credit if the issue ever reaches collections.

Outcomes vary based on the bill, the provider's policies, and how the dispute is followed up. Industry estimates of error rates on hospital bills range from 30% to 80% depending on bill type, sample size, and methodology (Medical Billing Advocates of America; published academic studies). We don't publish customer outcome data and don't promise a specific dollar amount. We promise an audit that surfaces the issues with the math behind them; the negotiation outcome is between you and the billing department.

Audit it anyway. The Explanation of Benefits (EOB) shows what your insurer paid, but the underlying line items can still contain coding errors, unbundled charges, or duplicate items that affect your patient responsibility. We compare against Medicare and commercial-rate benchmarks to surface anything that looks out of line.

First, send the FDCPA §1692g debt validation letter we draft (within 30 days of the collection notice for full statutory rights). The collector must verify the debt in writing before continuing collection. Then, if the underlying bill has issues, dispute those with the original provider in parallel. Collectors are required to mark the debt as 'disputed' on any credit reporting while the dispute is open.

Yes — and it's especially valuable for self-pay patients, who are typically billed the chargemaster rate (the highest published price). Hospital Price Transparency files include cash-pay rates that are frequently lower than the chargemaster — the gap varies by hospital and procedure. The dispute letter requests the cash-pay rate cited from the hospital's own published file. Charity-care eligibility under ACA §501(r) is also worth checking for any non-profit hospital — income thresholds and discount levels are set by each hospital's published Financial Assistance Policy.

Yes. Caregivers managing parents' or relatives' bills are a common Family Plan use case. You upload the bill, run the audit, and either sign-and-mail yourself if you have power of attorney or signing authority, or hand the printed letters to the patient to sign. The Family Plan ($97/month, 10 audits) is built for exactly this scenario.