[24605] in Privacy_Forum
[ PRIVACY Forum ] Script of my national radio report yesterday on
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Lauren Weinstein)
Tue Sep 29 10:26:32 2026
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 2026 07:17:16 -0700
From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren@vortex.com>
To: privacy-dist@vortex.com
Message-ID: <20260929141716.GA12364@vortex.com>
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This is the script of my national radio report yesterday on how
Trump's Medicare is using AI to reject preapproval Medicare
treatments, in some cases leaving patients in literal agony. As always
there may have been minor wording variations from this script as I
presented this report live on air.
- - -
Well, the short answer is ... it's not going very well at all. We've
talked before about a whole range of related AI problems. Examples of
these include sometimes crucial errors in AI-generated reports created
from police officer body cameras, potentially devastating errors in
transcriptions of recorded doctor-patient interactions, like
inaccuracies about medications a patient is taking or even confusing
which body parts are involved in an important, or potentially critical
treatment. Some health experts are recommending declining to have your
discussions with doctors monitored by AI, assuming you're even asked
for permission.
In theory these kinds of AI-generated reports are supposed to be
verified by humans, but human nature being what it is, it's clear that
the human verification step slacks off very quickly. This can leave AI
reports that can sometimes appear to be written by idiots, which
frankly isn't a surprise, because we've all seen that current AI
systems tend to have less real intelligence and common sense -- as we
normally use those terms -- than your average damp sponge.
What you may not know is that recently the federal government, which
of course is currently very gung ho on AI, started an experimental
Medicare program called "WISeR" where private companies are using AI
as part of approvals or rejections of Medicare treatment preapproval
requests. And apparently Medicare is planning to expand this procedure
beyond the current set of treatments in the experiment to a much
larger array of Medicare services.
A whole mass of documents recently became public regarding this AI
Medicare program, and it's very upsetting reading. Patients are
reportedly being left literally screaming in agony when pain relief
treatment approvals were taking far too long -- in at least one case
months instead of a few days -- and in many cases were being rejected
outright because these firms reportedly have a financial incentive to
reject as many procedures as possible. Even when these firms are found
to be not processing claims properly, the financial penalties are
relatively small.
This whole system, especially as it impacts managed care like Medicare
Advantage, appears to be designed to use AI as an excuse to deny as
many treatments as possible, with the documents now public suggesting
that many of those denials were unjustifiable. As I mentioned,
reportedly Medicare wants to EXPAND this program despite its record of
failures, including using AI-based decisions in time-sensitive
situations like emergency transport and the like.
Even if these AI systems were capable of 100% accurate analysis of
these situations, using them in this kind of way to provide an excuse
for reducing necessary treatments would be unacceptable. But we know
how error-prone AI is, often spewing out completely inaccurate and
sometimes dangerous wrong answers, misinterpretations, and
misinformation. That makes the situation orders of magnitude worse.
Cutting down on genuinely wasteful Medicare spending is a laudable
goal, But it's intolerable to be treating Medicare recipients as
guinea pigs for AI, with patients often blocked from important
treatments by those AI systems, while Big Tech AI CEOs are literally
partying it up with government officials.
Medicare is supposed to be a service, not an AI experiment that
apparently can actually harm patients. Rather than running an AI
Medicare experiment on vulnerable seniors, perhaps these Big Tech AI
CEOs and their friends in government, should be experimenting ... on
themselves.
- - -
L
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
lauren@vortex.com (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren
Signal: By request on need to know basis
Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
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