Dr. Oz wants an agentic AI tool for every Medicare/Medicaid beneficiary, blames "nihilism" for people not trusting AI

[highplainsdem]

https://www.nextgov.com/artificial-intelligence/2026/03/ai-nihilism-barrier-better-health-care-cms-lead-says/412088/

AI ‘nihilism’ is a barrier to better health care, CMS lead says
By Edward GrahamMarch 12, 2026 02:34 PM ET
CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz said the agency has had internal discussions about introducing an agentic AI tool “for every beneficiary.”


LAS VEGAS — Artificial intelligence has the potential to transform the delivery of healthcare services across the U.S., but patient distrust of the technology’s capabilities needs to be met with a greater response by clinicians on how it can maximize medical care, the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said on Thursday.

During a keynote session at the HIMSS conference in Las Vegas, CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz said new tools like AI can radically improve the delivery of care from rural communities to large cities, but that “our biggest — and your biggest — challenge is nihilism.”

He said internal data collected from querying Medicare patients found that they still do not trust AI — a barrier to greater adoption and deployment of these tools, since “no one has gotten to them with the use case of why it will transform their life for the better.”

To help overcome this continuing hesitancy, he said healthcare professionals “need to embrace the reality that both in health and in medical, we need to reach the people who are using these tools and compel an idea to come up, which is, ‘If we use this right, it will save lives, transform your ability to get access to care, allow us to manage a $1.8 trillion business, and we'll all be better off.”

-snip-

He said they want to start introducing agentic AI for Medicare/Medicaid beneficiaries by the end of this year. He expects these autonomous AI agents to "help" people pick their Medicare plan and which doctor to go to.

I've read a lot of horror stories about AI agents. They're a serious security risk, and Dr. Oz apparently would want them to have your health information, if they're supposed to tell you what doctor to go to.

Thread on the security risks:

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100220988564


And from Stat News yesterday, an article about the same Las Vegas health software conference Dr. Oz spoke at:

https://www.statnews.com/2026/03/11/ai-agents-himss-google-microsoft-epic-oracle/

The rush of new AI agents that autonomously perform a range of health care work highlights concerns that have been percolating since health AI picked up steam several years ago. While these products are often backed by glowing testimonials from clinicians, their rapid commercialization is also accompanied by questions about how to effectively embed them into doctors’ work routines, establish trust with patients, and prevent bad outcomes, such as biased decisions, inaccurate bills, and medical errors.

“A lot of the products being rolled out are not as validated as we would like them to be,” said Nicholson Price, a law professor at University of Michigan who co-authored a recent study on factors that influence patients’ trust in AI. “It’s just bad for governance.”

One recent review found that AI agents are rapidly being deployed in areas such as documentation and decision support for diagnosis and treatment, but that most evaluations of their performance are based on simulated medical settings or basic question answering. The Trump administration has broadly sought to deregulate AI tools, prioritizing the speed of deploying the technology over the creation of guardrails.

-snip-

While evaluation and monitoring methods are still under development, technology companies in the race for AI dominance are pressing forward.

This is the AI bubble in healthcare.

Which Dr. Oz wants to force everyone on Medicare or Medicaid into.

[CentralMass]

1. People trust him and this administration less.

[yellow dahlia]

2. No fuckin way!

[TommyT139]

3. Absolutely not.

Anyone who supports AI supports environmental destruction and authoritarianism. And apart from being a faster calculator, it's no replacement for humans.

[dgauss]

4. It's not AI itself that I distrust.

It's the motivations of the people that use it.

[jmowreader]

5. Oh my...

BETHESDA, MD (Spurious News Network) -- The "agentic AI tool" Dr. Mehmet Oz, Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, has demanded to help improve the Medicaid system has run into significant blowback after it began prescribing what some observers called an "extreme solution" to the problem of pedophilia.

"We don't know why," said Dr. Oz, "and we may never know why, but the new Agentic AI Tool not only prescribed but set up an unbreakable appointment for any male registered as a Republican to undergo what it calls 'preventive penectomy and orchidectomy.' We're trying to figure out why this happened, but over 25,000 Republican men have already undergone the procedure."

Penectomy and orchidectomy are an outpatient surgical procedure described by Daniel Whitney, a stand-up comedian who performs as Larry the Cable Guy, as "they cut yer dick and balls off! And they only do it to Republican men! What in the hell is going on here?"

According to Sheree Alstrom, a spokesperson for the Child Welfare Information Gateway, "while it is true that pedophiles flock to the Republican Party, there's no way we can condone penis amputation as a solution to this problem."

Carlo Fratelli, a Republican voter from Flushing, N.Y., describes himself as the first man on his block to receive the procedure. "When they told me I might need to have my privates cut off I thought that was kinda cruel. When I got the letter ordering me to get it done, I was like 'I'm gettin' on the first plane to anywhere!' Then my president, the wonderful man Donald Trump, told me it was for the children and, by damn, I was on a surgical table with my pants off that same day. And I'm going to overlook that my president's only in the Epstein Files thirty-five thousand times."

[Blue Full Moon]

6. AI is set up to deny.