Click here to meet Ana—the friendly “nurse” who can prep you for a doctor’s visit, answer your medical questions, and speak multiple languages. Sounds great, right? Well, Ana isn’t actually a nurse. She’s an AI chatbot, part of the latest push to replace human healthcare workers with artificial intelligence.
Hospitals are rolling out AI at a breakneck pace, claiming it will streamline patient care and ease the workload on nurses. But nursing unions see something far more sinister: a creeping effort to replace trained professionals with robots that lack human intuition, common sense, and compassion.
National Nurses United, the largest nursing union in the country, has been sounding the alarm. “Hospitals have been waiting for the moment when they have something that appears to have enough legitimacy to replace nurses,” said union leader Michelle Mahon. And now, they have it.
Under Biden’s disastrous leadership, thousands of nurses left the profession, burned out by endless COVID mandates, bureaucratic red tape, and hospitals that put profits over patient care. Now, instead of improving conditions to bring real nurses back, the solution is apparently to roll out an army of AI assistants like Ana.
Take Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s newly appointed Health Secretary. He’s already suggested AI nurses could be “as good as any doctor” when delivering care to rural areas. Dr. Mehmet Oz, Trump’s pick to oversee Medicare and Medicaid, argues AI can “liberate doctors and nurses from all the paperwork.”
Sounds great in theory—until you realize hospitals are already pushing AI beyond administrative tasks. AI systems are now flagging patients for serious medical conditions before nurses even evaluate them. One ER nurse in Nevada nearly followed AI-generated instructions to flood a kidney failure patient with IV fluids—until a doctor intervened and stopped what could have been a fatal mistake.
These so-called “intelligent” systems are also drowning nurses in false alarms, with some even mistaking basic bodily functions—like using the restroom—for medical emergencies.
But this isn’t just about safety. AI-driven healthcare is also about money. Companies like Hippocratic AI initially pitched their chatbots at a rate of $9 per hour—far less than a real nurse’s $40 per hour salary. The goal? To slash costs and maximize profits while patients unknowingly rely on glorified chatbots for their medical needs.
The AI takeover isn’t stopping at hospitals. Israeli startup Xoltar is now testing “human-like” AI avatars to conduct video calls with patients. Meanwhile, some hospitals are already using AI bots to “counsel” patients on chronic pain and smoking cessation.
The real problem? AI works fine for healthy, proactive patients—but that’s not the majority of people flooding emergency rooms and struggling with chronic conditions.
America needs more nurses, not robots pretending to be them. As AI continues creeping into healthcare, one thing is clear: this isn’t about helping patients. It’s about cutting costs, reducing accountability, and phasing out human decision-making.
Technology should assist nurses, not replace them. But if the trend continues, we might soon find ourselves in a world where the only person “caring” for you in a hospital is a soulless AI chatbot with a script.
