Pearl is a clinical professor of plastic surgery at the Stanford University School of Medicine and is on the faculty of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is a former CEO of The Permanente Medical Group.
Many who follow the news about AI chatbots and their use in the medical field view it as a battle for supremacy between AI and physicians. But a careful analysis leads me to a different conclusion.
ChatGPT and other generative AI applications are becoming more powerful by the month. Recently, researchers organized a head-to-head contest between a chatbot and a group of physicians. The challenge: answer 195 medical questions from the r/AskDocs subreddit page. A team of independent healthcare professionals then reviewed the responses and crowned AI the clear winner.
Not only were AI-generated answers more accurate and detailed than those provided by physicians, but the bot’s responses were deemed significantly more empathetic, as well.
This AI triumph came not long after Google’s Med-PaLM 2 scored an expert-level 86.5% on the U.S. medical license exam and before ChatGPT learned to write clinical notes just as well as humans.
AI can now retain and recall a near-limitless corpus of knowledge, translate text into multiple languages and convert highly complex ideas into simple terms. These qualities make chatbots ideal for diagnosing rare diseases, offering 24/7 medical advice and improving communications with patients.
This should be viewed as great news for the healthcare industry and not as a threat to doctors. That’s because well-trained humans will always remain superior to machines in one vitally important area of medical care: Only humans can establish personal relationships built on a foundation of mutual trust and commitment.
This is a critical component of good healthcare and the best weapon in the fight against our nation’s most troublesome medical problem. Chronic disease is the nation’s leading cause of death and disability, affecting 60% of all Americans. Studies affirm that a combination of preventive care, early diagnosis and lifestyle change (diet, exercise, counseling, etc.) helps people avoid heart attack, cancer and stroke (the life-threatening complications of asthma, diabetes, hypertension and obesity and other chronic illnesses).
Communicating lifestyle and preventative care changes to a patient demands a doctor’s focused and unhurried attention—something few primary care physicians can provide today. It’s not for lack of trying or desire. Rather, the U.S. medical system doesn’t train or retain enough primary care physicians and it inadequately finances the ones it has.
Of course, one important solution is adding more primary care physicians given that the primary care workforce declined by 11% from 2005 to 2015. And, despite the worsening chronic disease epidemic, our nation spends just 6% of total healthcare dollars on primary care—a figure that hasn’t budged in two decades. This, despite a Harvard-Stanford research collaboration that found adding 10 primary care physicians to a community increases average life expectancy by 250% when compared to adding 10 specialists.
Generative AI can help people solve these problems.
Doctors are constantly battling the clock as they see more and more patients each day. The average office visit is down to 17.5 minutes, barely enough time to order tests and prescribe medications, let alone build trust, show empathy or discuss lifestyle improvements. It shows. Today, 60% of Americans feel their doctors are rushing through exams. An equal percentage of primary care doctors feel burned out, citing “increased workload” as a leading cause.
Sophisticated generative AI applications can complete some of the primary care physician’s more routine work so that doctors will have the time to do what they do best: provide the unhurried care that chronically ill patients so badly need.
The U.S. government must lead the way when it comes to protecting our nation’s health. Accomplishing that will require investments in both humans and machines. Here are three opportunities:
1. Reallocate dollars to primary care
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) maintains a $2.68 trillion budget for Medicare and Medicaid. A scant 2% to 5% of that spending goes toward primary care services. Bumping that allocation to 8% would allow doctors to add vital support staff— assistants, dieticians and health coaches— thus boosting expertise, giving doctors more time to build trust with patients and helping reverse our nation’s chronic disease burden.
2. Increase residency positions
The United States faces a projected shortage of up to 48,000 primary care physicians by 2034. Yet, last year, more than 1,000 doctors graduated from medical school without a residency match. That’s because there weren’t enough government-sponsored training positions available. Congress can fix this problem by funding 1,000 more primary care positions each year—a tiny expenditure that would pay for itself within a couple of years with reduced medical expenses from chronic illness.
3. Invest in AI expertise
Doctors are starting to use generative AI for everyday tasks: writing letters to insurers, transcribing notes, double-checking diagnoses and populating medical records. These robotic undertakings help free up valuable time for doctors to spend with patients. But the pace of adoption is slow. With a small investment (like the $35 billion Congress earmarked for the “meaningful use” of electronic health records in 2009), the U.S. government would accelerate the development and implementation of safe and effective AI tools for primary care.
This combination of increased training, added office support and AI assistance will help rebuild the doctor-patient relationship, address our nation’s chronic disease epidemic and improve the failing health of America. It’s naïve to believe that relying on machines or doctors alone will be enough.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.