In a featured essay, physician-anthropologist Eric Reinhart warns that the rapid spread of AI across U.S. healthcare—now tapped by roughly two-thirds of doctors and most health systems—risks further commodifying medicine and weakening the human relationships at the core of care. While backers say AI can ease burnout, improve diagnosis and cut costs, Reinhart argues that models inherit longstanding biases, enable insurer denials, and, in profit-driven settings, turn efficiency gains into higher productivity mandates rather than more time with patients. Tools such as AI scribes and chatbots, he writes, can deskill clinicians and reshape how patients narrate illness, reinforcing an “algorithmic gaze” that reduces people to data. He calls for guardrails on corporate data capture and public investment in caregiving and social supports, contending that technology should serve a care-centered health system—not the other way around.
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