An AI Health-Care Unicorn With MAGA Origins Attracts an Unlikely Coalition

In late 2023, Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz testified at a Senate Finance Committee hearing about how health insurance brokers target elderly Americans. “The Medicare enrollment and navigation process is broken,” Blumenfeld-Gantz told the committee. He described a thicket of marketers and lead generators who sought to persuade patients to choose private Medicare Advantage plans, often in lieu of the standard federal program known to most people as just Medicare.

Those private plans, which make up the most profitable category of the health insurance industry, provide additional benefits beyond what Medicare offers, such as dental and vision insurance, but they come with trade-offs. Whereas most doctors accept Medicare, the typical Medicare Advantage option has a much more limited network of doctors, requires prior authorization for more medical procedures and sometimes leaves patients with unexpectedly large out-of-pocket costs. According to Blumenfeld-Gantz, the people pitching those private plans don’t always make these trade-offs clear. Instead, he told the Finance Committee, they “traffic in scare tactics, imitate government agencies like the federal Medicare program and inaccurately advertise plan benefits.”