Integrating artificial intelligence into the health care sector will ultimately lead to opportunities for a stronger workforce rather than fueling job losses, Dr. Mehmet Oz argued at Semafor World Economy in Washington, DC.
“If we can get the average American to get access to the care that they should want — it will allow them to reach a higher level of success in what they want to do in their lives, including, by the way, participating in the workforce,” he said on Thursday.
The administrator of the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services continued his campaign for using AI in health care — pitching once again the possibility of robotics to offer better prenatal care to women in rural America, such as ultrasounds, or remote programs for mental health patients who lack access to care.
However Dr. Oz said he was worried about the security risk that comes with AI. “The bigger concern I think is the possibility that AI doesn’t do what’s best for you as it gives advice — that it gets manipulated, it loses its way, hallucinates, [that] forces take control of how you get advice that may not be actually serving you.”
The CMS administrator, who has played a central role in US President Donald Trump’s health care policy strategy, also stood his ground on the administration’s crackdown on Medicaid and Medicare fraud — particularly in New York state, where Dr. Oz had previously claimed Medicaid had provided 5 million people with personal care services.
CMS walked back those claims last week when it told The Associated Press that the real number of New Yorkers who used those services last year was actually about 450,000.
Dr. Oz said the crackdown on Medicare and Medicaid fraud was still “100%” valid.
Personal care services provided to Medicaid recipients today are not being used for their original purpose, and that’s part of the problem of waste and fraud, Dr. Oz argued.
“We’re basically doing things for you that your family used to do for you — transporting you to a doctor’s clinic visit, bringing your groceries to you from the store, taking care of balancing your checkbook,” he said, emphasizing that tax dollars should instead go toward things like curing cancer.
“If you really want to deal with the fraud, and you use technology and better data-set analysis to find these bad apples, with lots of red flags, showing that they’re taking and stealing money, you can do it. But you have to actually want to stop the fraud.”