One in four American adults is turning to AI with their medical problems as they struggle with the rising costs of doctors’ visits.
Some 25 percent of those 18 and older are asking AI for advice on their health issues because they can’t afford an appointment, according to a survey of 1,250 adults by insurance platform Insuranceopedia.
“When healthcare becomes too expensive, AI starts filling a gap it was never meant to replace,” CEO Max Coupland said.
The research also found that Gen Z was by far the most likely to go to AI for medical advice - 53 percent of those 18-24 have done so.
And respondents with the lowest incomes ($45,000-$49,999) chose AI over a doctor at nearly five percentage points higher than the next-closest income tier.
But medical experts have serious concerns about the safety and accuracy of asking a chatbot about health problems.
AI’s language-learning models lean toward answers that make the user happy and it lacks the ability to leverage context and other factors to understand a patient’s situation, according to a report.
“When a patient comes to us with a question, we read between the lines to understand what they’re really asking,” Dr. Ayman Ali, fourth-year surgical resident at Duke Health, wrote. “We’re trained to interrogate the broader context. Large language models just don’t redirect people that way.”
AI chatbots provide problematic medical advice about half the time, according to a study last October in the peer-reviewed medical journal BMJ. Some 20 percent of answers were considered highly problematic.
Chatbots performed best when addressing people’s questions about vaccines and cancer, and performed worst for stem cells, athletic performance and nutrition, the study found.
AI has a place in people’s lives, though, Mayo Clinic notes. It can be helpful in explaining medical terms or giving general wellness advice such as “How can I add more movement into my day?”
Consumers are leveraging AI for non-diagnosis information too, the Insuranceopedia survey found.
Some 22 percent of U.S. adults use AI to understand the complexity of their health insurance coverage, 19 percent want help understanding their medical bills, and another 16 percent say they use AI to compare health insurance plans.
The spike in AI use for medical issues comes as 44 percent of Americans say it’s difficult to afford healthcare costs, according to December 2025 survey results from healthcare data and analysis group KFF.
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