Last week, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz proposed a bizarre remedy to rural America’s mental health crisis. “Sixty million Americans live in rural parts of this country,” Oz said by way of introduction, appearing onstage at an event announcing the administration’s new “Action for Progress” behavioral health initiative. “Their life expectancy is about nine years shorter than those in more urban parts of the country. Mental health issues drive a lot of that.”

Then came his solution: “I am telling you right now, there’s no question about it—whether you want it or not—the best way to help some of these communities is going to be AI-based avatars. Agentic AI.” He described systems that could “do the intake, catch the patient, customize to what their needs are, understand what they’re up to.” Then he made a direct appeal to the audience: “Please go play with these tools; they are unbelievable.”

To call this a strategy is to reframe abandonment as innovation. That same hour on the same stage, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had said that the addiction epidemic “feeds a national malaise of loneliness, of despair.” In previous remarks, rolling out the Great American Recovery Initiative, he had gone further: “When we cut off our relationships with other human beings, we lose that access to the divine, and that is a healing power. We are in a spiritual malaise in this country.”

Strip away the futurist gloss from Oz’s answer, and the message to 60 million rural Americans becomes stark: Your suffering is rooted in disconnection from other human beings, and the federal response is you should talk to a robot.

Just days before, an executive order from the president outlined the broader framing for the Great American Recovery Initiative, a whole-of-government push to align federal efforts on addiction prevention, treatment, recovery, and reentry. It framed........

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