Trump admin using AI to deny medical care for seniors in disastrous experiment

In January, the Trump administration launched a pilot that hands artificial intelligence a new kind of power over Medicare care: it can approve or deny certain services before patients get them. That is a sharp break from how the federal program for seniors has worked, since Medicare previously did not require doctors to go through prior authorization for these cases.

The early reaction was ugly. News reports quickly described technical problems, slow decisions, bewildering denials, angry doctors and patients left waiting while they were in pain. This month, those accounts got more substance when the Electronic Frontier Foundation published federal documents it had obtained through litigation.

The papers included comments from healthcare providers, and one was blunt enough to call the program “a disgrace to the human race.” That same feedback described patients crying in pain while they waited for care. The picture that emerges is not of a tidy efficiency drive, but of a system inserting delay between seniors and treatment.

Lawmakers have started asking questions and pushing to shut the program down. The Government Accountability Office added another problem in May, saying Trump officials did not follow proper procedure when they set WISeR up, which raises questions about whether it was legal in the first place. Even so, the program is still moving forward, with plans to grow it in the years ahead.