The Intelligence Economy: Breaking Health Care’s “Iron Triangle”

AI could make health care a major but underappreciated beneficiary of artificial intelligence by improving quality, access and cost simultaneously.

• Health care is expected to represent more than 18% of the US economy by the end of 2026, while the sector accounted for only 9.1% of the S&P 500 as of July 31, 2026.
• More than 100 million Americans live in communities without adequate primary care, while fewer than half of graduating physicians express interest in primary care and clinician shortages are expected to reach up to 86,000 by 2036.
• AI-enabled models combining software, nurse practitioners and health coaches could deliver specialist-grade guidance continuously at low marginal cost, supporting prevention and earlier management of chronic conditions such as diabetes and hypertension.
• Doctors and nurses spend an estimated 20%–30% of their time on administrative work, so automation could return clinical capacity to patient care and ease labor constraints.
• AI may accelerate innovation across drugs, devices and diagnostics, although improvements in drug-development success rates could remain years away because of biological complexity, limited training data and the need for long human trials.
• Moderna and Merck’s V940 cancer vaccine, combined with Keytruda, achieved statistically significant and clinically meaningful improvements in recurrence-free and distant metastasis-free survival versus Keytruda alone in a Phase 3 melanoma trial announced in August.

Takeaway: Investors may be assigning too little value to AI’s long-term earnings impact on health care companies, but regulation and misaligned incentives could delay adoption and the most transformative drug-development benefits remain uncertain.