Healthcare Dominance

It began with a shared secret at a recent Davos Summit. Five executives, bonded by paranoia over looming antitrust hearings, found common ground in a different vulnerability: their own health. Each had access to experimental, proprietary AI-medical suites for their personal use. The diagnostics were terrifyingly precise, the treatment plans impeccably personalized.

"The public system is medieval," muttered the CEO of Potestas AI. "We have the cure, and we're hoarding it." Out of this observation and subsequent discussions, "Project Asclepius" was born—not as a public good, but as a private takeover of the world’s health care marketplace. They formed a shell consortium and, state by state, county by county, they offered overwhelmed public health authorities a deal they couldn't refuse: a fully AI-managed clinic, funded upfront, for a fixed per-patient annual fee.

The AI their companies jointly created did it all: intake, diagnosis, prescription, even therapy via eerily empathetic chatbots. It was seamless. Budget deficits vanished. Waiting lists evaporated. The executives had successfully positioned themselves as de facto health overlords. They viewed human doctors as friction—expensive, emotional, and litigious. They launched a whisper campaign about "provider variability" and "AI-enhanced outcomes," while their lobbying arms drafted legislation recognizing AI diagnostics as "standard of care."

Soon, human professionals were phased into being mere overseers roles monitoring dashboards that monitored other AIs. The executives, their own health perfectly managed by the system's elite tier, rarely saw a human doctor anymore. They had not just replaced a workforce; they had cynically engineered a dependency, turning the nation’s, and others, healthcare demands into a silent, vulgarly profitable, and controlled utility.