Since he was 12, Bryan Kopsick has gotten an infusion of a drug called Remicade every eight weeks to control his Crohn\u2019s disease, a painful bowel inflammation that can cause severe diarrhea. The medication lets Kopsick, now 30, caddy professionally on the PGA Tour and at other golf tournaments. This Jan. 1, however, his health insurance changed, and the new company, UnitedHealthcare, wanted him to try cheaper alternatives to Remicade, which costs tens of thousands of dollars a year. \u201cMy heart started beating fast,\u201d Kopsick says. He didn\u2019t want to mess with a treatment that had worked for more than half his life. The only time he\u2019d missed a dose, he\u2019d developed another inflammatory condition that caused painful cysts. Now, Remicade was controlling that too. <\/p>\n
\u201cYou don\u2019t know what you\u2019re going to do,\u201d Kopsick recalls of the moment of panic. \u201cYou know you\u2019re going to be screwed.\u201d A UnitedHealthcare rep was supportive but powerless to override the denial, he says. And sure enough, Kopsick developed new cysts in February, not long after missing his dose. It was then that he began speaking with Warris Bokhari<\/a>, a British doctor and entrepreneur. Three years ago, Bokhari co-founded Claimable, a company that helps patients appeal their health insurance denials using artificial intelligence. He also works directly on appeal letters that his company hasn\u2019t yet fully automated, what Bokhari calls \u201chand-to-hand combat\u201d with insurers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Since he was 12, Bryan Kopsick has gotten an infusion of a drug called Remicade every eight weeks…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":410797,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[343,35244,22246,4670,12808,497,163,521,85,12810,911,67046,46,21074,303,125,194095],"class_list":["post-410796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-bloomberg-businessweek","tag-businessweek","tag-california","tag-chief-executive-officer","tag-drugs","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-il","tag-industries","tag-information-technology","tag-insurance-industry","tag-israel","tag-law-firms","tag-startups","tag-technology","tag-u-s-department-of-veterans-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=410796"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410796\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/410797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=410796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=410796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=410796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}