Meet Holden Karau: a San Francisco Bay Area software engineer who created an AI tool to help appeal insurance denials.
Her project, Fight Health Insurance, is a labor of love. It draws on her tech expertise and 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.
An Arm and a Leg host Dan Weissmann talked with Karau about what it took to build the tool, how it works, and what she hopes comes next.
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Transcript: Fight Health Insurance — With Help From AI
Note: “An Arm and a Leg” uses speech-recognition software to generate transcripts, which may contain errors. Please use the transcript as a tool but check the corresponding audio before quoting the podcast.
Dan: Hey there–
Let’s start with introductions.
Carolyn: My name is Carolyn DeSimone, and I have a super cute dog. His name is Professor Timbit. He’s a professor because he’s always researching something.
Holden Karau: My name is Holden Caro, and I’m trying to make health insurance suck a little bit less
Dan: Carolyn and Holden are married, and I talked with them in September because listeners had been sending me links to a story in the San Francisco Standard, with the headline “‘Make your health insurance company cry’: One woman’s fight to turn the tables on insurers.”
That woman was Holden. She works in tech, and the story was about a tool she’d built, to help people fight health insurance: It writes appeal letters, using AI of course.
She’s made it available at a web site, “fight health insurance dot com”
I lose count of how many of you sent me that link, but thank you, SO much.
Holden and Carolyn live in San Francisco. I talked to them on Zoom. A local reporter, Lee Romney, helped set up mics for the two of them in their living room.
The bookshelves in the background had — along with …