Bring On The Robots

A human pretending to be a robot, poorly, is worse than a real robot.

I have serious questions about AI’s ability to do certain things. I’ve made that clear. But there is one area where machines will be vastly better than people, and I have the anecdote to prove it.

I’m self-employed. I have an ACA plan. My wife is on that plan. I signed up over the phone on the advice of an insurance rep, despite doing almost everything online. They typo’d her birthday by one day. One digit. Their mistake, not mine.

This should take 30 seconds to fix. Instead, I got an interrogation about revenue, taxes, and whether we’re planning to move. A machine would see that the date entered differs by a single digit from all corroborating documents, fix it, and move on. No script reading. No irrelevant questions. No agent fishing to sell another policy, which I suspect is exactly what was happening.

The “Human-in-the-Loop” Fallacy

We often talk about keeping humans “in the loop” to ensure empathy and judgment. But when a process is governed by a rigid, poorly designed flowchart, the human isn’t providing judgment. They are merely a slower, more expensive, and more biased processor than a piece of Python code.

A basic validation script would catch a one-digit discrepancy against existing records and execute the change. The human agent, by contrast, has incentives that are diametrically opposed to my goal of a 30-second correction. Commissions. Call-duration metrics. Fear of deviating from a script. Their employer designed the process to extract revenue from every interaction, not to resolve problems efficiently.

The Billion-Dollar System That Still Can’t Validate a Date

We all remember the ACA Marketplace website launch. A billion-dollar disaster. That is the same system I just called into. Not a metaphor. The same platform. They spent a billion dollars building it, it failed, and their solution was to route people to a human on a phone, reading from a script, asking questions that have nothing to do with a transposed digit. The system that couldn’t validate a date in 2013 still can’t validate a date in 2025. Technology evolved; the ACA website apparently did not.

Here’s what should worry us: the danger isn’t that AI will be “evil.” It’s that it will be wrapped in the same bureaucratic layer that crippled the website. Give a broken process a faster engine and you just reach the wrong destination sooner.

Why This Isn’t Just an Annoyance

I have MS. I do NOT want a different policy. My meds are pre-approved and set. My wife went for a routine checkup and discovered this problem. All I want is to fix a typo they made. That’s it.

When you are managing a condition that requires precise continuity of care, a “cascade of re-verification” isn’t an inconvenience. It is a threat to medical stability, arguably an American with Disabilities Act (ADA) violation on its own. The agent doesn’t benefit from a quick fix. They benefit from a longer call, a new enrollment, and a fresh commission. The incentives are structural, not incidental.

Can AI handle ACA enrollment? Almost certainly. The waste generated by the current system is externalized onto the people it’s supposed to serve. We don’t just need better code. We need a complete dismantling of the commission-and-script architecture that treats patients like data-entry errors.

The solution is obvious. Bring on the robots.