Katie Kirchner

How a 1974 Law Made AI-Powered Insurance Denials All But Impossible to Fight Prominent health insurers are increasingly using artificial intelligence (AI) to process medical claims and prior authorizations. What few realize is that when this system fails, patients have almost ...

I was pleased to get to write this piece for @rooseveltforward.org. With proliferation of insurer reliance on AI tools to deny claims & prior auths, workers in self-insured health plans regulated by ERISA are esp vulnerable because if harmed, no legal recourse. www.firesidestacks.com/p/ai-powered...

A General Air of Anxiety - Boston Review The Red Scare targeted my father. He taught me the meaning of resistance.

Must read

www.bostonreview.net/articles/a-g...

Here is part I of my piece w/ Noa Rosinplotz on "ABAWDs," a category constructed to provide a rhetorical punching bag for politicians who want to cut the social safety net. This piece focuses on misconceptions about the group. Part II will be on the consequences of sorting folks by "deservingness."

Graphic with an image of FDR

Social Security is one of the most important public programs in US history.

It helps millions retire with dignity, supports people with disabilities, and keeps families afloat.

A cornerstone of economic security worth fighting for. #ProtectSocialSecurity rooseveltinstitute.org/blog/doge-wa...

For so long, so many of us warned about heading right to this moment:
www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

Trump Stands to Profit As He Signs Crypto Legislation The president signed the GENIUS Act, which would establish a regulatory framework for stablecoin, but critics have raised concerns over conflicts of interest.

“If the president can issue his own currency, then the White House becomes a storefront for personal gain, and the mind runs wild with all the possibilities for corruption,” said Bilal Baydoun, director of Democratic Institutions at the Roosevelt Institute.”

www.thedailybeast.com/trump-stands...

does not take a crystal ball to know that this will not end well

Crypto Week: Brought to You by $TRUMP The House has declared this week “Crypto Week,” seeking to pass major legislation that would embed cryptocurrencies more deeply into the US financial system. Yet the real story here is how this week is the culmination of efforts designed to specifically enrich Donald Trump personally at the expense of everyday consumers.

✅ Take crypto lobbyists' money to win the election
✅ Have crypto sweepstakes events at a White House dinner
✅ Gut consumer protection services
✅ Pass bills written by the same crypto lobbyists

The makings of a disaster Americans do not deserve
www.firesidestacks.com/p/cryp...

Collateral Damage in Federal Work Force Cuts: Summer Interns

At the very beginning of their professional lives, some young people have had their summer internships derailed by the Department of Government Efficiency.

AI and Government Workers: Use Cases in Public Administration - Roosevelt Institute In a new analysis Samantha Shorey explores how AI tools in state and local government can burden public workers and undermine service quality—posing risks to equity, efficiency, and job stability.

New Roosevelt report out today! How AI is changing the jobs of the govt employees Americans interact with most: the folks who process your marriage license, unemployment insurance, driving tests. Upshot: new tech is just transferring more work onto citizens rooseveltinstitute.org/publications...

This bill isn’t just an economic travesty, it’s a moral one. Forget trickle down economics; we’re now in a greed-first economy, one that will take great moral courage to overturn.

Another corporate pardon.

'Looking Back, Moving Forward': A New Podcast From Ms. Traces Feminist History to Light the Path Ahead We’ve been here before—and our shared histories can illuminate the feminist fight forward. Looking Back, Moving Forward, a new podcast from Ms. Studios hosted by Carmen Rios, explores what we can lear...

👏 Roosevelters are bringing bold ideas to Looking Back, Moving Forward, a new series from @msmagazine.com.

🎙️ Tune in to coming episodes for insights from Senior Fellow @lenorepalladino.bsky.social and others leading the fight for gender and economic justice. msmagazine.com/2025/06/27/l...

You cannot be so much of an institutionalist that you let the institutions bring us fascism. What was the value of the insitutions supposed to be in the first place?

Hoping we'll all have a little less patience for defeatism, moaning about the electorate and democracy, etc. We can win. It is not a given that we will. But if you aren't willing to see it as a possibility or think creatively about how to get there, politics isn't for you.

The Simple Truth About These Miserable Heat Waves Much of the country is facing brutal, potentially deadly heat. The reasons for such extreme events are not complicated.

“The world’s climate is behaving exactly as we said it would all along, for many years. It is warming due to human influence. It gets faster if we don’t act on it.”

https://trib.al/nef2X6T

it’s even more demoralizing when the history you’re repeating is history you were around for the first time

Feels like the current trend in the U.S. is that a lot of people will experience climate change as a creeping, steady boil of rising rents, insurance premiums and prices for everyday items that fewer and fewer people will be able to swallow month to month

‘Jaws’ made people fear sharks. 50 years later, can it help save them? Scientists are using the lure of Steven Spielberg's blockbuster to aid shark conservation efforts.

After 450 million years of evolutionary history, shark populations are collapsing, and more than a third of shark species and their relatives face extinction.

Now scientists are trying to use the lure of “Jaws” to advance shark conservation efforts.

Map of the United States showing the percentage of adults with medical debt from 2019-2021. Each state is color-coded, ranging from light blue (5%) to dark purple (15%). Source: KFF Tracking.

Medical debt isn’t a personal shortcoming—"it is the result of decades of policy failure and, frankly, sabotage."

A broken insurance market and state refusal to expand Medicaid have left millions, especially Black and Hispanic Americans, vulnerable. rooseveltinstitute.org/public...

It was clear that it was going to be a disaster and also that there was nothing anybody could do to stop it as they went through the steps to justify it. So you just had to sit and watch in horror.

Everyone Is Using A.I. for Everything. Is That Bad?

i just find this so bizarre. searching through texts and doing the reading for myself is how i actually think through ideas! trying to put together a sentence is how i figure out what i actually want to say!

As a Roosevelter, I feel a particular responsibility to this. FDR laid out four freedoms—of speech and expression, of religion, from want, and from fear—that remain the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy that we must fight for.

And as FDR said when ended that speech: “Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights or keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose. To that high concept there can be no end save victory.”

Quote that reads: The patchwork approach that many parents must use in finding care—a mix of formal and informal, paid and unpaid, regular and irregular providers—is not serving parents or children well. We need a comprehensive system for filling these gaps that starts in early childhood, spans after school and summer, and is affordable for all families and accessible by all children.

NEW: Too many families rely on a patchwork of care—unpaid, informal, unaffordable.

In a new report, @kedseconomist.com lays out federal, state, and local paths to a Child Development System that meets families’ real needs: whole child, whole day, whole year. rooseveltinstitute.org/publications...

The idea that the progressive left used the internet to bully institutions into accepting unpopular, far-left positions is the exact opposite of what has actually happened. The alt-right used the internet for ideological capture and they are now in the White House bragging about it daily

And as FDR said when ended that speech: “Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights or keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose. To that high concept there can be no end save victory.”

As a Roosevelter, I feel a particular responsibility to this. FDR laid out four freedoms—of speech and expression, of religion, from want, and from fear—that remain the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy that we must fight for.

Where we, as a country, fell short in response to the campus encampments, to Mahmoud Khalil and other student activists, and over the last decade as the backlash to protest grew: we cannot fall short now. We can not be fractured.

On Democratic Dissent: Part II - Roosevelt Forward On March 8, the Trump administration detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate student activist at Columbia University. Khalil, a legal permanent US resident, was not formally charged with a cri...

This administration seeks to use conflict both to rally its base and to fracture its opposition. That’s what’s happening now, and it’s what happened in their approach to Mahmoud Khalil’s detention, which I wrote about as it was happening: rooseveltforward.org/2025/03/26/o...