Prof. Daniel Schwarcz Interviewed by Europe Says About AI Making Decisions on Health Insurance Coverage

Professor Daniel Schwarcz, Fredrikson & Byron Professor of Law and Distinguished University Teaching Professor, was interviewed by Europe Says about health insurers being accused of using AI programs to deny payments to people, despite their doctors saying the care was necessary, and are facing lawsuits. Prof. Schwarcz said AI programs can make very specific predictions about someone’s future health based on the information that’s fed into them, and those predictions are being used in the process of approving or denying medical claims. And exactly what went into making those predictions — and whether it is the AI or the human who ultimately holds the final authority — is often opaque from the outside. He said, “The reason we want human review is we want human substantive judgment. We want AI to be supporting that. But the difficulty is distinguishing between AI supporting meaningful human processing and AI basically replacing the human with the human just passively defaulting to the AI judgment. It’s just incredibly hard to distinguish between those two in practice, particularly in rules or regulations.”