JOHN YANG: Tonight on PBS News Weekend, Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners are freed in the latest steps forward for the Gaza ceasefire, while Israel's truce in Lebanon appears to be in doubt.

Then, an AI transcription tool used in hospitals that makes up text, including imaginary medical procedures and even content that's racist.

WOMAN: If you have an AI tool that is just kind of fabricating racial content, you do have to wonder how that could possibly add to some of the racial disparities that we've seen historically in healthcare settings.

JOHN YANG: And the 11th hour Biden administration move to erase medical debt from millions of Americans Credit Reports.

(BREAK) JOHN YANG: Good evening.

I'm John Yang.

Jubilation in both Israel and Gaza today as hostages and Palestinian prisoners were freed in the latest advance for the fragile Israeli-Hamas ceasefire.

In Gaza City, there was a highly choreographed transfer of four young female Israeli soldiers from their Hamas captors to the Red Cross.

Later, at a hospital in Israel, they were reunited with families.

There were similar reunions in Gaza and the West bank for 200 freed Palestinian prisoners.

15 months of war meant many had no homes to return to.

A threat to the truce arose today when Hamas didn't release of female civilian hostages said it would.

In response, Israel said it would not allow displaced residents to return to northern Gaza as it had agreed to.

Meanwhile, on Israel's northern front, Israel said it would keep troops in Lebanon beyond this weekend's deadline to withdraw as part of the ceasefire with Hezbollah.

They said Hezbollah and Lebanon haven't kept their end of the deal.

Special correspondent Simona Foltyn is in Lebanon.

SIMONA FOLTYN (voice-over): In the ruins of Nabatieh.

Hezbollah's flag still flies high despite the devastation in Lebanon's south.

The war with Israel is considered a victory.

Bread and high fives are distributed to celebrate and to honor the sacrifice.

Abbas is an ardent supporter of Hezbollah, the Resistance, as it's called here.

He's holding a picture of the group's late leader, Hassan Nasrallah, killed in an Israeli strike last September.

ABBAS KHOMEINI, Hezbollah Supporter (through translator): The damage will be compensated.

We lost the person next year to us, Saeed Hassan Nasrallah, that's the main loss.

May God protect Resistance.

We won.

If it wasn't for them, we wouldn't be in Nabatieh.

SIMONA FOLTYN (voice-over): But for all the talk of victory, it's undeniable that Hezbollah's heartland has been hit hard.

There's a feeling here that Israel hasn't just been targeting the group's fighters, but punishing its supporters as well.

Much of Nabatieh's historic market is no more.

In the burned out shell that was once his shop, I met Mohammed Jaber.

MOHAMMED JABER, Shop Owner (through translator): I put a lot of effort into this shop.

It was distinguished in Nabatieh by its look and character and location.

SIMONA FOLTYN (voice-over): In the words of Nasrallah, Lebanon was supposed to be a support front to help its ally, Hamas.

But it turned into a major battleground, a miscalculation that cost Lebanon dearly.

This is the only one of Mohammed's four shops standing still.

He's careful to criticize his Hezbollah.

MOHAMMED JABER (through translator): We were surprised when the front opened.

They called it a support front, but I mean, we would have been better off without it, because in the end the front came to us.

Maybe this destruction wouldn't have happened.

Maybe.

Or maybe the Israelis would have finished Gaza and then come here.

SIMONA FOLTYN (voice-over): The market was also damaged in the 2006 war.

Back then, Mohammed got financial support from Hezbollah.

The group has again promised compensation, which comes from its main backer, Iran.

Mohammed has yet to receive it.

MOHAMMED JABER (through translator): We didn't know anything until now.

They say that Hezbollah and the state will compensate, but until now, nothing is clear.

SIMONA FOLTYN (voice-over): By chance, we ran into Lebanon's environment minister touring the city.

Nasser Yassin is also responsible for the government's emergency response.

NASSER YASSIN, Lebanon's Environment Minister: What we see here in the heart and the downtown of Nabatieh.

Nabatieh is the main city of this district.

And you see this is all commercial, this is all civilian.

This is clearly an urban site.

The attack by the Israeli forces on this city and in other parts of Lebanon was clearly an attack on civilians, attack on everything that's related to the everyday life of the Lebanese.

SIMONA FOLTYN (voice-over): More than 100,000 houses have been destroyed across Lebanon, and the Israeli army continues demolitions in the areas it still occupies.

NASSER YASSIN: The level of destruction, the aggression of the Israeli forces, the firepower of the message used, is unprecedented for a country that's been through wars.

But this is really unprecedented.

SIMONA FOLTYN: This is what towns and villages across southern Lebanon look like.

But despite the widespread damage, Hezbollah has portrayed itself as the victor of this war.

Now, even here in Lebanon's south, where Hezbollah enjoys widespread support, not everybody agrees, though people don't dare to criticize the group on camera.

I spoke to one shop owner who told me that this war has been a huge loss for Lebanon and the Hezbollah has been weakened not just militarily, but also politically.

SIMONA FOLTYN (voice-over): The election of Lebanon's new president earlier this month is a sign of these shifting political winds.

Former army commander Joseph Aoun was favored by the United States, but had long been opposed by Hezbollah's political wing.

His appointment ended two years of political stalemate and showed that Hezbollah's influence has diminished.

Aoun pledged to implement Lebanon's fragile ceasefire deal with Israel and to ensure that the Lebanese army replaces Hezbollah as the dominant armed actor.

JOSEPH AOUN, Lebanese President (through translator): I will make sure that the country, and only the country, will carry weapons.

SIMONA FOLTYN (voice-over): The remark was met with applause.

But Hezbollah has resisted disarmament in the past.

The even bigger challenge for Aoun may be to force the IDF to withdraw from southern Lebanon in line with the deal.

And then there's the human cost of this war, which continues to rise despite the ceasefire.

Since October 2023, Israeli attacks on Lebanon have killed more than 4,000 people, according to Lebanon's Ministry of Health.

That includes hundreds of children.

Many more have been left with life changing injuries.

In a hospital in the eastern Beqaa Valley, I met seven year old Noor.

She survived an Israeli strike in October but suffered brain damage.

She can't see, hear, speak or walk.

ABDULLAH MOUSSAWI, Father of Strike Victim (through translator): She was playing with her cousins when the bomb hit.

Her cousin lost an arm.

All the children were affected.

But unlike her, look at her.

My daughter was very beautiful, very cute, very smart.

SIMONA FOLTYN (voice-over): Noor is her parents only child.

This was her life before the war.

Jumping into swimming pools and doing cartwheels like an ordinary child anywhere else in the world.

Whether or not the ceasefire holds, North's life will never be the same.

Her father blames the United States.

ABDULLAH MOUSSAWI: America is the mother of terrorism.

In Lebanon and in Gaza they are bombing us with American weapons.

I want to tell you something.

Whether it's Muslims, Christians or Jews, we all believe in the afterlife.

We will get our justice there.

SIMONA FOLTYN (voice-over): Hezbollah may have been forced to take a step back, but it still enjoys support among many Lebanese Shia.

One night they gather to commemorate their fallen leader.

Resistance against Israel is deeply ingrained in this community's DNA.

HAWRA BAZI, Hezbollah Supporter (through translator): The way we rebuilt in 2006, we will rebuild again.

We are committed to this path more than were before.

SIMONA FOLTYN (voice-over): Hawra Bazi is the mother of a fallen Hezbollah fighter, a price she's willing to pay again.

HAWRA BAZI (through translator): I raised my son on this approach, and I will raise my grandson the same way.

I will pass on the teachings of Hassan Nasrallah.

SIMONA FOLTYN (voice-over): The latest war between Hezbollah and Israel, however costly, may not be the last.

For PBS News Weekend, I'm Simona Foltyn in Lebanon.

JOHN YANG: In today's other news, Pete Hegseth was sworn in as defense secretary.

Vice President J.D.

Vance administered the oath office hours after casting the dramatic tie breaking Senate vote to confirm Hegseth.

Three Republicans voted against him, including former Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Today.

Hegseth thanked the vice president.

PETE HEGSETH, Secretary of Defense: We look forward to having the backs of our troops and having your back in executing peace through strength, in putting America first and in rebuilding our military.

Mr. Vice President, thank you for breaking the tie.

JOHN YANG: President Trump's cabinet continues to take shape.

Today, the Senate confirmed Kristi Noem is homeland security secretary.

The vote was 59 to 34.

The former South Dakota governor said her top priority is border security and immigration enforcement.

Several news outlets are reporting that President Trump has fired more than a dozen inspectors general at nearly every cabinet level agency.

It caps a first week in office in which Mr. Trump has taken steps to reshape the federal government, including removing officials he says as unfriendly to his agenda.

Inspectors general are presidential appointees intended to be independent watchdogs to help prevent mismanagement and abuse of power.

Under the law, removing them requires 30 days advance notice to Congress.

And there's a new American champion down under.

Madison Keys won her first Grand Slam title at the Australian Open, beating the top ranked player in the world, Aryna Sabalenka.

At 29, Keys is one of the oldest women to become a first time champion.

Sabalenka had won the last two Australian Opens.

After the match, she smashed her racket in frustration.

Still to come on PBS News Weekend, an AI transcription tool used by many hospitals that makes things up and the effect of removing medical debt from the credit scores of millions of Americans.

(BREAK) JOHN YANG: As artificial intelligence increasingly becomes part of daily life, both its benefits and its pitfalls are becoming apparent.

Take medical centers.

Many of them use an AI powered tool called Whisper to transcribe patients' interactions with their doctors.

But researchers have found that it sometimes invents text.

It's what's known in the industry as hallucinations that raises the possibility of errors like misdiagnosis.

Garance Burke is an Associated Press global investigative reporter who's been looking into this.

Garance, I first want to give folks an example of what researchers found.

Here's what a speaker said and after she got the telephone, he began to pray.

Simple sentence, but here's what was transcribed.

Then he would in addition to make sure I didn't catch a cold, he would help me get my shirt, kill me.

And I was he began to pray.

What sorts of other hallucinations have been found?

GARANCE BURKE, Associated Press: Yeah, so in talking with more than a dozen engineers and academic researchers, my co-reporter Hilka Shellman and I found that this particular AI powered transcription tool makes things up that can include racial commentary, sometimes even violent rhetoric.

And of course, what we're talking about here, you know, incorrect words regarding medical diagnoses.

So that obviously leads to a lot of concerns about its use, particularly in really sensitive settings like in hospitals.

JOHN YANG: We asked OpenAI about this and here's what they told us.

They said we take this issue seriously and are continually working to improve the accuracy of our models, including reducing hallucinations.

For Whisper, our usage policies prohibit use in certain high stakes decision making contexts, and our model card for open source use includes recommendations against use in high risk domains.

Given those warnings, why do so many medical centers use this?

GARANCE BURKE: You know, I think we're at a time when a lot of healthcare systems are looking to AI and AI agents to do things that human beings do more efficiently and at scale.

There's a lot of talk about the promise for AI to help unlock new kinds of diagnoses in electronic health care records that haven't been possible before.

But here's really the concern is that if these AI models are not, you know, up to the task of the very kind of precise and specific language that is used to analyze these kinds of electronic health records, we could end up with some really problematic transcriptions that have nothing to do with what a patient actually told a doctor.

JOHN YANG: In healthcare settings, did you find any places that checked the accuracy of these transcriptions?

GARANCE BURKE: You know, there are some places that have adopted OpenAI's Whisper model and really sought to fine tune it and then keep the original audio, say, of what the doctor discussed with the patient so they can fact check that original recording against whatever the AI model wrote down as having been said.

But we did find one company that just threw out the original audio, which obviously you know, could raise some real red flags.

If what the AI said transpired is really the only record that exists.

JOHN YANG: Is there any government regulation of this or the possibility of government regulation?

GARANCE BURKE: There has not been real rigorous regulation of this kind of use of AI powered transcription models.

What we're seeing is that, you know, healthcare systems themselves really took note of our reporting and started asking a lot of questions about whether their use of this AI model was the best way to go forward.

So I think we may see a certain amount of self-regulation and we'll see what happens under the new Trump administration.

JOHN YANG: You mentioned that it sometimes adds racial commentary.

Is there any effect or potential effect on the equity issues in medicine?

GARANCE BURKE: Well, I think one of the issues that we ran across here is this AI model just inserting the word black in a transcription that some of the researchers analyzed.

If you have an AI tool that is just kind of fabricating racial content, you do have to wonder how that could possibly add to some of the racial disparities that we've seen historically in healthcare settings.

JOHN YANG: Is there anything patients can do to protect themselves?

GARANCE BURKE: You know, we spoke to one person who said that she decided to opt out of having her daughter's doctor's visit recorded simply because she had concerns about the privacy of their family's intimate medical history being shared with a big tech company.

So I think there are some opt out provisions that patients can look into.

I do know that a lot of these models are being fine-tuned by hospitals and healthcare systems that really do have patients well-being in mind.

But as with everything involving AI, it's a good opportunity for patients to check in as to how their data is being used and who actually ends up with ownership of it.

JOHN YANG: Garance Burke of the Associated Press, thank you very much.

GARANCE BURKE: Thanks so much for having me.

JOHN YANG: Cost of health care is one of the leading reasons for consumer debt in this country.

More than 100 million Americans are burdened with medical bills they can't pay.

In the final weeks of the Biden administration, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, issued new rules banning credit agencies from including medical debt on credit reports.

Those rules are set to take effect in mid-March.

Ali Rogan discussed what this new protection will mean for people carrying medical debt with Noam Levey, a senior correspondent with KFF Health News.

ALI ROGIN: Noam Levey, thank you so much for joining us.

So tell us first about what sort of medical debt ends up on people's credit reports.

NOAM LEVEY, KFF Health News: So most people probably are familiar with if they don't pay a medical bill, maybe it gets sent to collections.

But only some medical bills actually get reported on people's credit scores.

So it's really depends on kind of what the hospital or what the doctor does.

But the tricky thing for consumers is you may not know or patients, you may not know when you go to the hospital how much jeopardy you're really in.

ALI ROGIN: But now this new rule is going to eliminate that completely, Right?

Tell us how that's going to work.

NOAM LEVEY: That's right.

So there are about 15 million people who still have some kind of medical debt on their credit score.

And what this regulation will do is force the credit reporting agencies to remove those bills so people will no longer have any medical debt on their credit reports.

And it will also prohibit lenders from considering unpaid medical bills as they make decisions about whether or not to extend somebody a mortgage or some other kind of loan.

ALI ROGIN: Is this going to have a retroactive effect or how is that going to work?

NOAM LEVEY: Effectively, yes, because if you have a medical bill on there, it's going to go away.

There's a tricky part of this in the sense that if you've put a medical bill on a credit card or you've taken out some other kind of loan, and we know people are doing this a lot, that is still going to show up on a credit score as like credit card debt.

ALI ROGIN: To what extent does medical debt tend to indicate whether somebody is credit worthy or not?

NOAM LEVEY: Well, so this was one of the main reasons why the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said that it wanted to put this regulation in place.

The reason for having dings on the credit report is so that lenders can look at it and say, well, this person, you know, hasn't paid their auto loan, they're behind on their credit card, maybe it's not a good thing to extend them a mortgage.

But when the CFPB looked at this, they said, in fact, people are not paying their medical bills.

That's not a very good indicator about what kind of a risk they may be.

Now, it should be pointed out that the folks that are challenging this rule and the credit reporting industry, as well as the collections industry, are actually suing to stop this regulation.

They have argued, among other things, that analysis by CFPB is flawed.

So I'm sure there'll be a lot of debate in the courts coming up about whether or not in fact, that analysis.

ALI ROGIN: Absolutely.

Before I ask you about the other side of this, I do want to play some sound from folks across the country who have been dealing with medical debt.

Let's have a listen.

CHRISTOPHER STARK, Wichita, Kansas: My name is Christopher Stark and I live in Wichita, Kansas.

MELISSA PITTARD, Arlington, Virginia: My name is Melissa Pittard.

I live in Arlington, Virginia.

KELLY GEORGES, St. Louis, Missouri: I'm Kelly Georges and I'm from St. Louis, Missouri.

CHARLES BOYD, WICHITA, KANSAS: My name is Charles Boyd.

I'm from here in Wichita, Kansas.

KELLY GEORGES: You know, nobody says, oh well, you're sick.

Let's not send you an electric bill this month.

That doesn't happen.

All your bills are still there.

And so you just start chipping away at your savings, chipping away at everything you have.

And ultimately chipping away at retirement.

CHARLES BOYD: When you have multiple medical situations, multiple medical bills out there from different specialists, different hospitals, and different collection agencies, you don't get to sleep without thinking about it sometimes.

CHRISTOPHER STARK: The medical debt that I have accumulated over the past few years has really impacted me, both obviously financially and as well as it's affected my mental health.

MELISSA PITTARD: I've had to creatively finance this medical debt, and I'm sure it affected my credit score, but I'm not sure how I've been chased by debt collectors.

CHRISTOPHER STARK: I like that the Biden administration moved to remove medical debt from credit reports.

And I think it's definitely taken a big burden off of my shoulders.

MELISSA PITTARD: I think it's needed to be done for a long time.

But for those of us who have been faced with doctors and specialists, other people, you're still going to end up being in trouble because you have to pay for it one way or another.

ALI ROGIN: Are these stories similar to the ones that you've heard in your reporting?

NOAM LEVEY: Yeah.

So we've been writing about medical debt for the last several years, and, you know, I've interviewed hundreds of people across the country.

And I think one thing that bears underlining is it's hard really to overstate the suffering that people are enduring because of medical bills.

And I mean, you saw, I think, some of the emotion there in people living with the stress of being unable to pay a bill or having to drain their retirement savings.

ALI ROGIN: What is the argument from the other side?

What's the argument in favor of keeping medical debt on credit reports?

NAOM LEVEY: I mean, there are a couple different arguments, one of which is from the credit reporting agencies, if you're going to be lending people money, you want to make sure that they're a good risk.

If those safeguards aren't in place, could we get back to a situation where were before the 2008, 2009 financial crisis where there was loose credit and people were taken on mortgages they couldn't pay, et cetera.

I think the other argument, which is an interesting one, is that from the collections industry, is essentially that if medical offices, hospitals are not able to essentially have a threat to report you if you don't pay your bill, they're going to start demanding that you pay up front before you actually get your procedure.

And there's an argument to be made that if that happens, does that actually put more barriers in front of people?

ALI ROGIN: And all of this motivates the question.

Is this just a band aid for broader problems in our health care system here in America?

NOAM LEVEY: Sure.

I mean, yes, it is a band aid.

I mean, there are much bigger problems.

The underlying problem is people can't pay $2,000 medical bills.

Right.

So they end up going into debt, goes on their credit reports and what have you.

I would say that some of the efforts to address sort of the worst problems associated with medical debt, like credit reporting, like people being sued, people having liens on their homes, these sorts of things probably deserve to be addressed even before we get to the much more difficult and complicated issues of how we make it cheaper to go to the hospital, how we make it cheaper to get a prescription at the pharmacy or an MRI or an X ray.

And that's a subject for another day.

ALI ROGIN: Bigger questions, certainly.

Noam Levy with KFF Health News.

Thank you so much.

NOAM LEVEY: Thanks.

JOHN YANG: And that is PBS News Weekend for this Saturday.

I'm John Yang.

For all of my colleagues, thanks for joining us.

See you tomorrow.