With each passing year, healthcare grows more expensive and less accessible. New technologies could slow—or even reverse—that trend. Artificial Intelligence can expand access, lower costs, and improve quality, but only if lawmakers don’t block its path. Precautionary regulations are piling up, stifling innovation and leaving AI tools subject to a patchwork of inconsistent restrictions. What’s needed is a clear, outcomes-focused framework that lets healthcare providers deploy AI tools already proven to match or exceed human capabilities. Patients and clinicians should have more choices, not fewer.
Thirty states have enacted laws regulating AI in healthcare. Most of these rules fall into three categories: limits on AI in processing insurance claims, mandates that patients be told when they are interacting with AI, and restrictions on how AI may be used clinically.
Transparency, especially in insurance claims processing, is important to maintain patients’ trust. But AI’s clinical applications offer the greatest potential to improve lives. In just a few years, AI enabled healthcare has moved from science fiction into a reality in which computers often match—or outperform—human clinicians in diagnostics and enhance the care they provide. That is exactly why well-intentioned but poorly informed legislation poses such a risk.
Justin Leventhal is a senior policy analyst for the American Consumer Institute, a nonprofit education and research organization that advocates for consumers through evidence-based analysis and data. Follow Justin on X @JustinLeventhal.