The inevitable outcome of Barack Hussein Obama’s infamous death panels, AI-driven medicine is fast becoming the norm, not only for seniors but for everyone. If you are on Medicare, beware: things are getting uglier by the day in terms of being an absolute Orwellian nightmare.
Take the case of Frances Walter, an 85-year-old Wisconsin woman with a shattered left shoulder and a respiratory condition who was forced out of her nursing home by an AI algorithm that decided she only needed to stay there for 16.6 days. On day 17, her Medicare Advantage insurer, Security Health Plan, cut off payment for her care in accordance with the algorithm, even though she was not yet healed.
Walter was forced to return home to her apartment where she lives alone – this despite medical notes dating back to June 2019 that show Walter’s pain was extreme, and she could no longer dress herself, go to the bathroom, or even push a walker without assistance.
It would take more than a year for a federal judge to fix the nightmare that the AI robots who decided Walter’s fate made. That judge ruled that Security Health Plan’s decision to obey the algorithm and cut off Walter’s coverage was “at best, speculative.”
Long story short, it was determined that Walter was owed thousands of dollars more for the care she received. And in pursuing retribution for it, she had to spend down her life savings and enroll in Medicaid just to be able to progress to the point of putting on her shoes, or getting her arm in a sling.
A STAT investigation found that while health insurance companies have been rejecting medical claims since the time when they were first concocted, the advent of AI-driven medicine has sent these denials to new heights, particularly under Medicare Advantage, which is funded by taxpayers (traditional Medicare is different).
“Behind the scenes, insurers are using unregulated predictive algorithms, under the guise of scientific rigor, to pinpoint the precise moment when they can plausibly cut off payment for an elderly patient’s treatment,” STAT reported. “The denials that follow are setting off heated disputes between doctors and insurers, often delaying treatment of seriously ill patients who are neither aware of the algorithms, nor able to question their calculations.”
