It’s no secret that the US medical system is broken.

From being billed thousands of dollars for simply giving birth to having to pay huge amounts for life-saving medication, companies are profiting from ordinary people’s misfortune.

And it’s disgusting.

So when the woman in this story saw the bill her boyfriend had been given after urgent medical treatment, she was incensed.

Read on to find out what she did about it, and how it ultimately ended in her boyfriend directing his anger at her.

AITA for how I fought my boyfriend’s medical bill, going “too far”?

My boyfriend had to go to the ER after a accident, and he got a truly ridiculous bill back.

I offered to fight the bill for him because I’ve done it before, and he said sure.

I went all-out, because honestly if we were out $5,000 after insurance, that would mess up our holiday plans pretty bad.

So I had him call the hospital and authorize me to handle his bill and access his medical records.

Let’s see how she worked to fight the medical bills.

I got an itemized bill and compared the prices for each code to the fair prices. I then called billing to dispute the bill, but was told that billing only collects bills, I’d need to contact admin to dispute.

Next, I bounced around a call center for hours trying to get someone who was actually qualified for bill disputes, and getting nowhere, so I google and LinkedIn searched for the hospital board of directors and upper management.

I got thirty emails of the most influential people at the hospital, plus the hospital’s investors, and every day I would send a few emails, working my way up the chain.

I wrote increasingly long emails describing how they billed my “client” at seven times over the fair price for services rendered, and how their billing department, customer service department, and the growing list of management I’d emailed, had failed to address the issue.

And she continued to work hard at this, until she got to someone who could actually help her.

I escalated the emails until I was writing to the director-level staff with the entire board of directors and a number of outside investors CC’d.

I asked for a written statement regarding their justification for billing at a rate seven times higher than the national average, for commensurate services to what is available at other hospitals.

I also sternly laid out the failures to appropriately respond, at every level of the company.

Well, once I’d done all that (which was honestly only like fifteen minutes a day) they reduced the bill from $5000 to $26. Yep, twenty-six dollars.

Let’s see how her boyfriend reacted when she reported back to him.

Well, I told my boyfriend the good news, and he was at first overjoyed and blown away, like literally jumping up and down and hugging me and saying I was literally a Christmas miracle.

But then when he asked how I did it, I said it wasn’t too hard, I just had to send a couple emails each day.

He was curious what I’d said, and I handed him my phone.

He started to get stressed, and flipping back through other emails. Which there were like sixty of.

Uh-oh. Suddenly, his Christmas miracle was something quite different.

He told me I went way too far, he was expecting me to dispute through their billing department or something normal and reasonable like that, not internet stalk every single manager and board member and investor and harass them into dropping the bill.

I was frustrated because I’d just saved us $5,000 and actually made it possible for us to afford a nice Christmas and save some money, while he was mad at me because I’d been a bit pushy?

I was furious, and he was also mad at me, saying he authorized me to dispute a bill, not basically threaten and harass a whole hospital for weeks.

Am I wrong for how I got my boyfriend’s medical bills dropped?

AITA?

It’s clear that this woman is both diligent and determined, and worked really hard to dispute an unfair bill.

And yes, she definitely did more than her boyfriend might have expected, and was a little intense in her approach, but many people would be really grateful for all the effort that she’d put in.

It might have been a good idea for her to check in with her boyfriend about this, because he understandably felt a bit blindsided by all this happening in his name, but to be mad at her for it?

That’s not okay.

Let’s see what the Reddit community thought about this.

This person, who’d been in a similar situation, explained that sadly, the effort she put in is the only way to get results.

While others thought she’d been nothing but professional.

This Redditor, meanwhile, was aghast at him being mad at her for her work.

His reaction was totally unacceptable.

If you thought that was an interesting story, check this one out about a man who created a points system for his inheritance, and a family friend ends up getting almost all of it.