Doctors Not AI Act: Right Problem, Bigger Stakes

Congress just told insurers: AI cannot deny your care alone. 🔥
The Doctors Not AI Act lands at exactly the right moment.

On September 1, 2026, Rep. Greg Landsman of Ohio introduced H.R. 10210, the Doctors Not AI Act. Two Democrats. Two Republicans. Bipartisan from day one, with Reps. Buddy Carter, Kim Schrier, and Tom Barrett as original cosponsors. Referred to three House committees: Energy and Commerce, Ways and Means, and Education and Workforce.

That is a serious bill with serious reach.

Here is what it would actually do.

🔹 Bar AI systems from issuing or dictating any adverse benefit determination involving clinical judgment.
🔹 Require a licensed health professional to independently review each patient’s circumstances before a medical-necessity denial takes effect.
🔹 Allow insurers to keep using AI to help process claims, just not to decide them.
🔹 Force insurers to disclose to patients when AI played a role in a denial.

Landsman put it plainly: “when a computer system is making decisions about health care, people will get hurt.”

He is right. And that is not a partisan statement. That is physics.

⚡ Here is my hot take.

This bill is necessary. It is also just the beginning.

Insurers did not adopt AI denials because they love technology. They adopted them because volume-based denials at scale are cheaper than human reviewers who might say yes. The algorithm is not the disease. It is the symptom. The disease is a system that financially rewards denial.

So yes, mandate the human review. Require the disclosure. Hold the line on clinical judgment belonging to clinicians, not code. All of that is correct.

But let’s be honest about the counterpoint. Insurers will argue that human review at scale is impossible and that AI actually speeds up approvals for the majority of claims. That argument is not entirely wrong. AI can process routine claims faster and more accurately than overwhelmed humans. The problem is the edge cases, the ambiguous cases, the complex cases. Those are exactly where patients get buried by automated denials, and those are exactly the cases the Doctors Not AI Act is targeting.

The bill draws a clean line. Routine processing is fine. Clinical judgment is not a machine’s job.

💡 What I want to see next is enforcement teeth.

A disclosure requirement without a penalty structure is just paperwork. If this bill passes and insurers disclose AI involvement but face no real consequence for wrongful denials, the disclosure becomes a shield, not a signal. Congress needs to pair transparency with accountability.

We are at an inflection point in healthcare AI. The tools are real. The upside is real. But a system that weaponizes AI to deny care faster than any human could review it is not innovation. It is industrialized gatekeeping.

Patients deserve a doctor’s judgment at the door. Not a model trained on margin.

👉 Follow Jonathan Govette, CEO of Oatmeal Health, for daily healthcare insights on LinkedIn. Deeper dives in The Oatmeal Bite on Substack: https://news.oatmealhealth.com