Hospitals overcharge millions of patients every year because the billing system is deliberately confusing. Recovered audits every line, finds the errors, and negotiates directly with your hospital. You only pay if we save you money.
85025 billed twice — no clinical justification for repeat on same visit
74176 is a component of 74178 per NCCI edits — cannot be billed separately
99285 Level 5 billed for uncomplicated kidney stone — Level 4 appropriate
76770 — patient confirms no ultrasound was performed during visit
Same procedure code billed twice on the same date with no clinical justification.
Visit level inflated beyond clinical complexity — common with ER levels 4 and 5.
Single procedures split into component codes to charge more. Caught via NCCI edit verification.
Services billed that were never provided. Identified by cross-referencing with your account.
Every charge compared against Medicare rates, FAIR Health data, and published chargemasters.
Insurance calculations checked — deductible tracking, coinsurance, and out-of-pocket max compliance.
Review for surprise billing violations and balance billing protections under federal and state law.
Medication charges compared to NADAC acquisition costs — hospital markups can exceed 10x retail.
Hospital facility fees assessed against the level of resources actually used during your visit.
Take a photo or upload your itemized bill and insurance EOB. That's it — we handle everything from here.
Every CPT code checked against CMS billing standards. Every price benchmarked against Medicare and regional rates. We flag any and all issues, then double and triple check to ensure our claim with the hospital is properly supported.
Dispute letters drafted and sent. Direct calls with hospital billing. Financial hardship applications filed. We don't stop until it's resolved.
Your routine ER visit gets billed as a high-severity emergency. The difference can be $1,000–$3,000.
A single procedure gets split into multiple separate charges. You pay for components that should be included.
The same test or service appears twice on your bill. Common with lab work and imaging.
You're billed for procedures or supplies you never received. More common than you'd expect.
A 47-year-old physician broke his arm skiing. He went to the ER, received an exam, X-rays, pain medication, and an arm splint. He was discharged the same day and had surgery at a different hospital the next morning.
His wife — a medical billing professional — requested the itemized bill with CPT codes. One charge jumped off the page immediately.
CPT 24505 is a procedure where a doctor manually resets broken bone fragments without surgery. The patient never received this. He had his arm splinted and was sent home. The hospital charged $6,961 for a service that never happened.
Other hospitals charge $201–$1,300 for this procedure. Medicare reimburses $1,892. Even if it had been performed, the price was 3.5× the out-of-network estimate.
The hospital initially rejected the dispute. The insurer said the claim was "processed correctly." It took persistent follow-up to get the hospital to admit the bill was "inappropriately coded."
Many people claim that requesting an itemized bill is futile — that your insurance has already negotiated the prices down and there's nothing left to dispute.
There's a grain of truth to this: simply requesting an itemized bill won't help unless you know what to do with it.
Unfortunately — but unsurprisingly — this pernicious claim is especially popular among those with a vested financial interest in patients blithely accepting hospitals' bills as accurate.
But the idea that hospital bills are always accurate is flatly wrong. Hospitals routinely overcharge patients — through coding errors, duplicate charges, phantom procedures, and inflated pricing. Most patients pay without questioning it because the system is designed to be a predatory labyrinth.
There's no guarantee we'll find errors on every bill, and we're completely transparent about that.
But if we don't save you money, you don't pay. Simple as that.
Keep an eye on your email — we'll send you instructions to securely share your bill. If we can save you money, we'll explain exactly how — and you only pay if we do.
I created Recovered after watching my grandparents struggle with medical bills they couldn't make sense of. Hospitals deliberately overcharge millions of patients every year, and they make their bills as convoluted, indecipherable, and intimidating as possible to get away with it.
So I dug into how the system actually works — the CPT codes, the Medicare benchmarks, the coding rules hospitals are supposed to follow but routinely don't. And I realised that it's absolutely possible to navigate the system and use it in your favour to pay a whole lot less than what you're initially billed. I proved it by helping friends and family do exactly that.
My grandparents weren't the only ones overwhelmed by their bills. Millions of Americans are paying more than they owe because the system is designed to be exploitative.
You don't pay a dime unless we successfully dispute what you were wrongfully billed. That's the deal, and if you ask me, it's a pretty good one.
Recovered is still young, and for now, it remains relatively small-scale. But I hope that as more people realise just how inaccurate their bills are — how much they're frequently overcharged — and that recourse is possible, this becomes something that helps many more people.
So meet Recovered — I hope it'll prove as helpful to you as it has been for me.
— William
We only charge you if we successfully reduce your bill. Our fee is 25% of the amount we save you. If your $5,000 bill gets reduced to $2,700, you saved $2,300 — our fee is $575. If we review your bill and can't save you anything, you owe us nothing. Zero risk.
Your itemized hospital bill (the one with CPT codes and line items — not just a summary). If you only have a summary, we'll tell you exactly how to request the detailed version. Your EOB from your insurer helps but isn't required to start.
All uploaded files are encrypted and stored securely. We never share your information with third parties. Your data is handled with the same standard of care as a healthcare provider.
Duplicates (same service billed twice), upcoding (higher-level visit than occurred), unbundling (one procedure split into multiple charges), phantom charges (services never provided), and pricing far above regional benchmarks.
Uninsured patients often see the biggest savings. Hospitals charge self-pay patients the full chargemaster rate — typically 5–10x what insured patients pay. We negotiate self-pay discounts and financial assistance, often reducing bills by 50–80%.
We can still help. Collection agencies purchased your debt at a fraction of face value, which means there's significant room to negotiate. We'll work with the agency or original provider to reduce what you owe.
Most patients do. You don't have to. Upload your bill — if we can't save you money, you pay nothing.
You're Probably Being Overcharged →