‘exacerbating the affordability crisis’
Page H2From§Eachthe noon edition — 28 September 2026
Three AI reports this month: hospital bills up $1 billion, wages threatened, DOGE's buyout priced at $6.7 billion.
As it ran on the front
The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association posted its numbers on September 24: the share of inpatient hospital cases billed as "medically complex" rose from 37 percent in early 2023 to 40 percent by the end of 2025. Hospitals run AI against the diagnosis codes now, and insurers run their own AI against the same codes, and the two machines have been arguing since 2023 in a currency that only moves one way.
Two weeks earlier, on September 9, the AFL-CIO's research arm read the sales material for electronic shelf labels, the digital price tags now going up in grocery aisles, and found the brochures pitch the labels to retailers on the same premise BCBSA uses to describe hospital software: a tool for finding money a human used to miss. For the shelf labels the money is found in payroll. The union's reading is that the savings show up as fewer hours and fewer jobs on the floor, not as a lower number on the shelf.…
…(cont) On September 16 the Government Accountability Office filed its own reading of an efficiency drive. The government spent $9.5 billion on paid administrative leave since the "fork in the road" buyout offer went out; $6.7 billion of that total was the buyout itself, the payments made to get federal employees to leave before the same kind of software could be pointed at their own jobs. An effort sold as trimming the federal payroll cost $6.7 billion to run, in the same month a hospital billing fight cost patients close to a billion dollars and a union warned grocery workers their hours were the next line item.
None of these three reports cites the others. Not the patient reading a bill coded for a condition they did not know they had. Not the clerk finding the schedule shrank the same week the labels went up. And on the DOGE line, not even the taxpayer, who paid $6.7 billion for the government's own version of the same machine, hon.
“Same machine that finds a pricier diagnosis code for your hospital bill is the one telling the grocery store it doesn't need you on the floor anymore, and the government spent six-point-seven billion dollars paying its own people to leave before that machine got turned on them too. Follow the direction the money moves, not the press release — it went the same way three times in one month, and none of those ways were toward your wallet.”
“Look, six-point-seven billion buys you a smaller government for decades, that's not a cost, that's an investment — okay, the report does file it under cost. But you have to pay people to leave the waste, that's just how buyouts work, and if the number landed in "spent" instead of "saved" that's a bookkeeping call, not a — did I just call seven billion in severance a bookkeeping call? That's not where I meant to go with that.”
The receipts
Artificial intelligence proponents claim AI will make healthcare more efficient, but an analysis published Wednesday suggests that the burgeoning technology is instead helping hospitals identify more lucrative diagnoses—and is driving nearly $1 billion in additional costs for patients and insurers. The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association…
· Union Report Warns Electronic Shelf Labels Could Kill Jobs and Crush Wages from the morgue, 9 Sep 2026
· DOGE’s ‘Fork in the road’ buyouts cost government nearly $7 billion: Watchdog from the morgue, 16 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.