Updated on Sept. 4, 11 am
At a hearing Wednesday, House Republicans and Democrats aired their concerns about direct-to-consumer artificial intelligence chatbots that pose risks to the mental health of American youth, while expressing a reserved enthusiasm about the potential of the technology.
The healthcare subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce committee held a hearing entitled "Examining Opportunities to Advance American Health Care through the Use of Artificial Intelligence Technologies." Witnesses at the hearing included executives from health tech startup General Medicine, Viz.ai, the Stanford University School of Medicine, Clover Health and the American Psychological Association.
Democratic lawmakers criticized the Trump administration’s actions on healthcare, from the passage of H.R. 1, which slashed Medicaid eligibility, to the recent ousting of Centers of Disease Control and Prevention Director Susan Monarez, Ph.D., by Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. last week.
Health subcommittee ranking member Diana DeGette, D-Colo., called for RFK Jr. to resign or be fired as head of the HHS. DeGette and other Democrats condemned the mass firing of federal workers from the HHS and called on committee Republicans to schedule oversight hearings about the firings.
“Rome is burning,” DeGette declared. “Rome is burning. More important than this is the peril that the Trump administration's policies have put my constituents and the constituents of every single person on this panel in … All of our constituents are at risk because of the risky and dangerous and unscientifically based principles of RFK Jr.”
Shifting the focus of the hearing back to AI technology, Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Va., chair of the health subcommittee, said Congress must examine the AI landscape for safety and oversight.
“It is critical that we continue these types of educational hearings to understand the evolving health AI landscape and ensure that Congress keeps up with the many advancements in the space,” Griffith said.
Lawmakers did not propose concrete frameworks for overseeing AI. Only Republican physician John Joyce, M.D., Pa., mentioned specific legislation to advance regulatory support for the technology. Joyce said he would introduce a House version of the Health Tech Investment Act that would establish a clear Medicare coverage pathway for AI-enabled devices.
Republicans, including chair of the full committee Brett Guthrie, Ky., expressed their enthusiasm about the potential of AI and President Donald Trump’s vision to establish American dominance in AI through his AI Action Plan released in July.
“Recent news stories have also highlighted potential safety concerns within proper personal use of AI, and the committee is working towards stronger guardrails to prevent tragic events occurring in the future, especially in healthcare," Guthrie said. "The committee remains steadfast in its efforts to improve the use of AI technologies while ensuring AI is used in a human-centric, responsible and safe manner.”
A key topic at the hearing was the potential dangers of AI chatbots, especially for youth. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle cited media reports that have revealed that youth have confided in AI chatbots and that has led them to isolation and even death.
In her opening statement, Vaile Wright, Ph.D., senior director of healthcare innovation at the American Psychological Association (APA), said Congress must protect adolescents from potentially harmful direct-to-consumer AI chatbots with age-appropriate safeguards. She also said that Congress must enact comprehensive federal privacy legislation to protect Americans’ data in light of AI advances.
“We must recognize that AI's effects are not uniform across all populations,” Wright said in her opening statement. “Adolescents, for example, are in a critical developmental period that makes them especially susceptible to influence. As outlined in APA's recent health advisory, AI systems designed for adults are not necessarily appropriate for youth. We must require age-appropriate safeguards, limit access to harmful or inaccurate health content, and establish robust protections for adolescents."
Michelle Mello, Ph.D., a professor of law at Stanford Law School and a professor of health policy at the Stanford University School of Medicine, suggested several policy levers to beef up oversight of AI in healthcare, such as modernizing FDA authority, increasing Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services reimbursement for AI and making post-deployment monitoring of AI a requirement for participation in federal healthcare programs like Medicare.
"You may be surprised to hear that most healthcare organizations and health insurers do little vetting of AI tools before they put them into use, and often no meaningful monitoring of their impact afterwards," Mello said in her opening statement. "There are good examples of AI governance processes and organizations willing to share what they’ve learned about how to do it. But governance takes work and resources, and the law doesn’t require it, so most healthcare organizations don’t do it.
Lawmakers emphasized that AI should not replace clinicians and that AI deployed in healthcare should have a human reviewing its work. They also discussed a plethora of use cases for AI including early disease identification, prior authorization and clinical documentation.
“The importance of rural health care was emphasized on both sides of the aisle during the hearing. Congress and the administration have shown interest in using technology to improve health care in rural areas, including through the Rural Health Transformation Fund,” Maya Sandalow, an associate director for BPC's Health Program, said in an email to Fierce Healthcare. “For business and tech leaders, there's a clear need to prioritize making sure these innovations are usable in lower‑resourced areas, and to be specific with policymakers about what guidance or support is needed to get there.”
Cybil Roehrenbeck, executive director of AI Healthcare Coalition and partner at Hogan Lovells, said predictable payment pathways for AI medical services is one of the most important issues for Congress to tackle.
The hearing reflected the reality: the stakes for AI in medicine are higher than in other industries, because these technologies can directly impact people’s health. At the same time, healthcare and medical practice is one of the most highly regulated industries in the United States—we have rule upon rule governing privacy, safety, and certification, and those rules still apply.