The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services just announced a $2 million prize for AI tools that will help caregivers manage the crushing burden of America's broken healthcare system. If that sounds like using a Band-Aid to treat a hemorrhage, congratulations—you're paying attention.
According to Hospice News, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unveiled the Caregiver AI Challenge on Tuesday, describing it as a "national competition to spark innovation" and find tools that "empower caregivers." The initiative targets both paid healthcare workers and the estimated 63 million Americans providing unpaid care to adults or children with medical conditions or disabilities—a population that's grown 45% since 2015.
Kennedy promises AI will "transform caregiving by delivering on-demand support, predicting health risks before they happen, monitoring well-being and automating paperwork so that caregivers can focus on what matters most." That last part—automating paperwork—is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Because the real problem isn't that caregivers lack AI-powered appointment schedulers. It's that they're navigating a fragmented, underfunded system designed to extract maximum labor while providing minimum support.
The United States faces a deficit of more than 100,000 healthcare workers by 2028, according to Mercer. Healthcare staffing shortages—exacerbated by the pandemic and worsened by systemic underinvestment—have been impacting end-of-life care quality for years. The response? A competition for AI tools.
This is the policy equivalent of noticing your house is on fire and announcing a contest for better smoke alarms. The problem isn't detection—it's the fire. Healthcare workers are leaving the field because of poor pay, unsafe ratios, inadequate support, and burnout from being asked to do impossible jobs with insufficient resources. AI that "predicts health risks before they happen" doesn't address any of those structural issues.
Jason Resendez, CEO of the National Alliance for Caregiving, touched on this during the HHS virtual event: "Right now, we have a broken system where institutional care is often treated as an entitlement, but staying in your own home requires navigating waiver programs and waiting lists and restrictions." He's describing a system that makes home-based care—the cheaper, more humane option—intentionally difficult to access. And the solution being proposed is... better monitoring algorithms?
The Caregiver AI Challenge will unfold in three phases: design, testing, and scaling. Tools will be evaluated on their ability to assist with medical appointment management, monitoring individual needs, and providing "person-centered support." Winners get $2 million split among them.
For context, $2 million is approximately what a single mid-sized hospice spends annually on staffing. It's a rounding error in HHS's budget. It's less than many individual AI companies spend on catered lunches during development sprints. This is not serious money for addressing a problem affecting 63 million people.
What $2 million will buy is some genuinely useful incremental improvements: better scheduling software, smarter medication reminders, perhaps some predictive analytics that flag deteriorating patients earlier. These aren't worthless. But they're optimizing around the edges of a system that's fundamentally broken.
Kennedy mentioned that many family caregivers "lack formal training needed to support their loved ones." This is true. It's also a choice. Other developed nations provide robust training, respite care, and financial support for family caregivers as policy. The U.S. treats family caregiving as unpaid labor that happens to save the healthcare system billions, then acts surprised when people burn out.
Kennedy promises AI will automate paperwork so caregivers can "focus on what matters most—the care and compassion of the people whom they seek to help." This reveals a profound misunderstanding of where the burden actually lives. Yes, documentation is exhausting. But the reason caregivers are overwhelmed isn't primarily administrative—it's that they're providing complex medical care, emotional support, physical labor, and crisis management with minimal training, no backup, and often while holding down other jobs.
AI can't lift a 200-pound patient. It can't provide the human presence that makes end-of-life care dignified. It can't replace the judgment that comes from knowing someone's subtle changes in mood or appetite that indicate deterioration. It can schedule appointments—but caregivers already know when appointments are. The problem is getting there, paying for it, and managing the aftermath.
The promise that AI will make caregiving "smarter, simpler and more humane" assumes the current inhumanity stems from insufficient technology rather than insufficient investment. It's the same logic that gave us gig economy platforms as a solution to wage stagnation—treating systemic problems as optimization challenges.
Universal paid family leave. Subsidized respite care. Higher wages for home health workers. Streamlined access to home-based care without Byzantine waiver programs. Training programs for family caregivers that don't require them to navigate bureaucratic mazes. Adequate staffing ratios. Mental health support.
These are not innovation challenges. They're political choices. They cost real money—not $2 million competition money, but sustained investment over decades. They require admitting that the current system is designed to fail, built on the assumption that families will absorb infinite caregiving burden without compensation or support.
Kennedy says "America's caregivers, you are not invisible." Then make them visible with policy. Pay them. Support them. Stop pretending algorithms will solve what inadequate funding created.
AI can help. It's genuinely useful for remote monitoring, documentation efficiency, and decision support. But launching a $2 million competition while 63 million people provide unpaid care in a system with 100,000-worker shortages isn't innovation. It's distraction.
The caregiving crisis doesn't need better apps. It needs structural change. And no algorithm can deliver that.
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