Source: Ars Technica
The Trump administration is testing automated AI systems to adjudicate Medicare coverage decisions—a direct application of algorithmic gatekeeping to one of the largest insurance pools in the U.S., affecting tens of millions of beneficiaries. This marks a shift from AI-in-healthcare as a diagnostic or administrative tool to AI as the decision-maker for what care gets paid for. The move raises immediate questions about appeal mechanisms, liability, and whether efficiency gains justify delegating rationing logic to machines that can't explain their denials. The prior authorization friction the article flags is the feature, not a bug: AI deployed here will likely accelerate claim rejections at scale, making coverage denial faster but not necessarily more accurate or contestable than human review.