Technology

AI Is About To Overhaul Entire Health Care Industry—But Is That A Good Thing?

(Tom Crane/Wikimedia Commons}

While the artificial intelligence (AI) boom is poised to improve parts of the U.S. health care system, it may also cause major issues for some patients, according to analysts.

Proponents of AI have touted the upsides of adopting the new technology in everything from identifying medical conditions to easing healthcare administrative burdens, while opponents have countered that it could raise ethical concerns. Several analysts told the Daily Caller News Foundation that while increasing AI use can potentially help bolster productivity and affordability in the health care sector, it may also result in problems such as patients receiving inaccurate medical information.

Relying on certain AI platforms for medical advice might pose major risks to patients, according to Christabel Randolph, associate director at the Center for AI and Digital Policy.

“The core risk is straightforward: AI systems can be confidently wrong,” Randolph warned the DCNF. “Large language models (LLMs), the underlying technology of ‘AI chatbots,’ are stochastic or probabilistic models. This means they generate responses based on randomness. Unlike a doctor who knows your history, examines you in person, and is legally and ethically accountable for what they tell you, an AI has none of those guardrails. AI can produce hallucinations and inaccuracies – plausible-sounding but factually incorrect medical information — and present it with the same tone as accurate information.”

“A patient acting on that could delay getting real care, take the wrong medication, or miss a diagnosis that matters,” she added. “A recent study of 21 frontier LLMs, showed that AI should not be relied upon for unsupervised patient-facing medical advice.”

Randolph also claimed the “most alarming” aspect of some patients attempting to use AI for health advice is “the accountability and oversight gap.”

“When a doctor gives you bad advice, there are legal and professional consequences,” she explained. “When an AI gives you bad advice — who’s responsible? Most AI companies disclaim liability in their terms of service and only provide a very small disclosure in the chat window that AI-generated answers can be wrong. Individuals simply cannot be expected to litigate every wrong output from an AI. It is up to federal agencies to enforce existing consumer protection law and exercise oversight on AI companies.”

Roughly half of Americans now rely on AI to make significant medical decisions without seeking advice from a doctor, KTAL reported on Saturday, citing survey data from the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.

Some have argued that AI also has the potential to improve diagnostic accuracy. Moreover, AI has been used in the early detection and prediction of cardiovascular diseases, according to a September 2024 report from the World Economic Forum.

A chatbot refers to a computer program that can simulate human conversation, with some programs relying on AI, per the IBM. Although AI chatbots can provide fast responses about health care-related questions, their lack of contextual understanding can lead to inaccuracies that can mislead patients and pose potentially dangerous risks, according to the Duke University School of Medicine.

“In the best case, AI integration in medical devices will help streamline some of the most cumbersome and administrative aspects of the job, especially paperwork, to free doctors up to spend more time with patients,” Emma Waters, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, told the DCNF. “There is also the very real opportunity to deep learning tools to expedite a doctors’ ability to research and diagnose rare conditions that require large databases of information, cases, and analysis to complete.”

“Still, I’m deeply concerned that in many cases doctors will not use AI as a tool but another way of outsourcing patient care or relying on algorithms to increasingly write treatment plans, provide a diagnosis, or make decisions about who receives care and when,” she continued.

However, AI has the potential to be a “helpful” tool for doctors, Joel Thayer, a senior fellow at the America First Policy Institute and president of the Digital Progress Institute, told the DCNF.

“I think it [AI] certainly helps in augmenting some of the things that doctors already do, Thayer told the DCNF. “You’re starting to see it being implemented pretty substantially in the radiology context where radiologists are now leveraging, at least AI in part, to determine specific ailments or weird masses, but it’s certainly not replacing the doctor. The doctor is just highlighting things that are much more rapid pace, and flagging it. So, if anything, it’s acting more as an, as a helpful assistant than a replacement. So I think that’s one of the most immediate impacts that you’re going to start seeing AI, helping out in those contexts.”

Though, Thayer also told the DCNF he thinks using AI chatbots for important health advice could lead to major issues.

“[If a patient] accesses the chatbot and says, ‘Well, hey, I have, I have this weird mole, what should I do about it?’ And then they either get a weird diagnosis or a weird set of things that you should do, and then maybe the person uses that knowledge to do something, maybe it doesn’t [work well]. But, I mean … I think that that’s just an issue with the internet at large. I mean, we all have Googled, symptoms and leveraged WebMD, and came out to very weird results, either scaring the crap out of us, like where we say, ‘Hey, I have this weird little mass that’s on my hip,’ and you look it up, and it says, ‘Oh, well, you might have terminal cancer.’ And then you flip out as a result. 
So, [that] increases your anxiety, I expect that [with] function of using chatbots … AI would be a little bit more problematic in that regard.”

The increasing adoption of AI could potentially help bring down health care costs in the U.S., according to Jeffrey Singer, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and president emeritus and founder of Valley Surgical Clinics Ltd.

“I think it [the expansion of AI] could go a lot towards lowering health care costs, increasing affordability and expanding patient autonomy,” Singer told the DCNF. “Because right now, basically, patients are sort of at the mercy of the health care system, where they have to make an appointment with a doctor, and, of course, the medical profession is there’s a lot of restricted entry points because of licensing and accreditation and all that.”

“This is gonna be an opportunity where people could, [and] it’s already happening, where people can download an app onto their phone, and it could be a doctor [that] could tell you everything you need to know,” he added. “You know, obviously, there is gonna be a liability concern, that the provider [on] the app platform is gonna have to address. So they, on their own, might decide, for example, not to tell you [that] you should see a specialist about this. Just like surgeons would do in private practice, you know? 
I’m a general surgeon in practice, and if I have a patient that has a much more esoteric problem, I’ll say to them, ‘You should see a surgeon who specializes in this,’ and I’ll give you a couple names. So, I can see the app doing that, but in general, this is gonna make it where people can basically have a doctor in your pocket. It saves a lot of time, a lot of money.”

Singer also said that AI becoming more widely used in certain health care settings is “great” because it can “basically make people have more control over their healthcare.”

“Not only that, but a lot of, there’s a lot of evidence now that AI … sometimes performs better than human doctors,” he said.

Still, there have been mounting concerns that the U.S.’ ongoing AI boom could potentially lead to surging health care costs across the nation. Research from the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association and its data analytics partner Blue Health Intelligence shows that the expansion of AI in hospital billing may be raising health care costs by upping both the number and intensity of diagnoses being billed without corresponding record of the expected treatment.

Some companies began utilizing AI platforms for drug discovery, HealthTech Magazine reported in February 2025. Moreover, Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk announced Tuesday that it was teaming up with OpenAI to integrate artificial intelligence across several of its operations, such as drug discovery, manufacturing and commercial activities, Reuters reported.

Still, AI technology has the potential to “significantly increase productivity in healthcare while also improving medical professionals’ ability to treat patients,” according to Wayne Winegarden, Ph.D., director of the Pacific Research Institute’s Center for Medical Economics & Innovation.

“Take administrative burdens,” Winegarden said. “Estimates put these costs as high as one third of all healthcare costs. AI has the potential to better manage this huge burden and cut the burden that these tasks impose on the healthcare system.”

There has been growing speculation that AI could eventually replace physicians, especially in areas such as radiology, pathology and dermatology, where the technology’s diagnostic capabilities can equal or surpass those of human clinicians, according to Harvard Medical School.

An American Medical Association’s Center for Digital Health and AI survey released in March found that more than four in five physicians, or 81%, utilized AI in their practices, marking an increase from 38% in 2023. The most common use of AI among physicians was related to medical research summarization and clinical care documentation, the survey showed.

In July 2025, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced a new effort to create a digital health ecosystem alongside several technology firms that partly aimed to improve patient outcomes and reduce provider burden, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati reported.

Politicians on both sides of the aisle have opposed new data center projects across the nation, with voters in Festus, Missouri, voting to oust four members of the town’s city council who greenlit a multi-billion-dollar data center project the week before. Voters in Independence, Missouri, and Port Washington, Wisconsin, also took to the polls to oust pro-data center candidates.

In March, President Donald Trump announced a new national legislative framework for AI, claiming his administration is “committed to winning the AI race to usher in a new era of human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security for the American people.” Trump also unveiled an AI “action plan” in July 2025 aiming to usher in “a new Golden Age of innovation, human flourishing, and technological achievement for the American people.”