AI, tech leaders are lobbying Trump health officials in a government-run chat room - Fierce Healthcare

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has a chat room. Not an announced one — federal regulatory channels are for people with time on their hands — but a real one, namechecked at industry conferences where the room already agrees with you. A "cadre of elite techies, financiers, and high-level Trump administration officials" has spent a year quietly charting a campaign to move Americans' medical records into apps. A year. Quietly. In a government chat room. Every word of that sentence should be on a consent form.

Marvel at the vocabulary Fierce Healthcare is working with: "quietly," "extraordinary," "rapid." In any other procurement context those three words would summon an auditor before lunch. Here they describe a persuasion campaign aimed at getting people to hand their healthcare data to products built by executives the public cannot name, bankrolled by financiers whose portfolios the public cannot see. The formal announcement through federal regulatory channels simply hasn't happened, which is a courteous way of saying the notice-and-comment bit — the part where you get to object — has been quietly, extraordinarily, rapidly skipped. The public, meanwhile, gets a conference-stage namecheck and the assurance that this is all for their own good.

We argued recently that government AI needs a legal release gate rather than a human-in-the-loop. It turns out the gate has been replaced by a chat window and the minutes are unavailable. The prize is CMS, which is to say the medical records of an enormous slice of the American public, wired into apps pitched in a room nobody was invited to. The upside, of course, is that nothing has been formally announced, so technically nothing is happening. That is how the tidiest decisions get made — at conferences, over canapés, with the door shut.