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The Last Thing US Healthcare Needs Is an AI Takeover

We fear that healthcare will become even more financialized as our systems become more deeply entangled with the AI bubble and the speculative investments that accompany it.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Donald Trump during a “Making Health Technology Great Again” event in the East Room of the White House, on July 30, 2025.

Those of us who work in the US healthcare system need a lot of things. A takeover by artificial intelligence companies isn’t one of them. Neither is the overwhelming hype that AI always seems to bring with it. Unfortunately, we’re getting both.

In January, for instance, The New York Times ran an op-ed with the headline “Stop Worrying, and Let AI Save Your Life.” The author, Dr. Bob Wachter, is the chair of the department of medicine at the University of California–San Francisco medical school and a proponent of AI’s use in healthcare. In the piece, Wachter touted AI as a way to fix the expensive inefficiencies of the American medical system, which he described as “in desperate need of transformation.” He will not be the last person to make such arguments.

As doctors who care for many people from marginalized communities, we find it difficult to be so bullish on AI—and not just because the quality and safety of AI technology is nowhere near guaranteed. We are worried that magical thinking about AI as a path toward real ‘transformation’ in healthcare, as Dr. Wachter suggests, will distract us from the current economic crisis that is crushing our patients. Far from its being a new chapter in how we deliver care, we fear that healthcare will become even more financialized as our systems become more deeply entangled with the AI bubble and the speculative investments that accompany it.

Medical journals now regularly feature robust debates about AI, and The New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association, the American medical journals with the largest footprint in medical science, now have entire sub-journals devoted to the topic. The coverage almost always deals with a narrow range of questions about the efficacy—and occasionally the medical ethics—of applying AI. How should we implement AI in [insert medical subspecialty]? Does AI perform as well as doctors on [insert task]? Occasionally someone will ask, “Does this really work as well as we think it does?” Questions about who stands to benefit most from the increased influence of tech profiteers over our healthcare system rarely get any space.

In the Times piece, Wachter hailed the use of AI assistants in clinical documentation. These so-called “scribes” are one of the simplest and most common forms of AI being systematically integrated in clinics across the country, including our own. The changes are currently marginal, but the conversation within medical institutions about them signals a trajectory toward stronger financial ties to the tech industry, with patients and healthcare workers as a captive “consumer” base and benefit accruing only to those who already hold political and economic power in our health system.

As doctors for patients who are poor, we think the current embrace of AI in healthcare misses the main issues at stake. Our patients are in the crosshairs of every form of violence produced by our current economic crisis. Many........

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