The Business of Health with Chip Kahn
AI: To Regulate, or Not to Regulate?
September 22, 2026
Video
Audio
About this Episode
Episode 16, AI Series: Across the tech industry, many of AI’s own leaders are calling for oversight — self-imposed or from government. That debate is on, but where it will land is anyone’s guess. Joe Grogan takes a different tack: the biggest threat in health care AI may not be too little regulation, but the wrong kind. And he has seen regulation from the seats where it gets made: the White House Domestic Policy Council, the federal health care budget at OMB, and before Washington, the industry side of bringing a cure for Hepatitis C to patients. Chip and Grogan discuss the federal government’s proper role in regulating generative AI, the growing patchwork of state AI laws, why CMS reimbursement structures need to change, and how Europe’s cautious approach is impeding the technology’s growth. Grogan closes with his two biggest worries: fear-driven policy that bans innovation outright, and the risk to patients’ most sensitive data as AI’s appetite for it grows.
The Host
Charles N. Kahn III is a senior visiting fellow at KFF. He is also a visiting senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a nonresident senior scholar at the University of Southern California’s Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics. He serves as co-chair of the international Future of Health collaborative.
Guest
Joe Grogan
Chairman of the Board, Paragon Health Institute; former Director, White House Domestic Policy Council
Joe Grogan is a health care expert with a unique blend of private sector and government experience spanning over two decades. In addition to serving as the Chairman of the Board and Public Advisor at the Paragon Health Institute, Grogan is serving currently as a Senior Fellow at the Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics at the University of Southern California.
Prior to serving in the West Wing as Domestic Policy Advisor, he was Associate Director for Health Policy at the Office of Management and Budget. In government, he also served as Special Assistant to the FDA Commissioner and as Executive Director of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA) during the George W. Bush administration.
He holds a bachelor’s degree from State University of New York at Albany and a law degree from the College of William and Mary.
SERIES
This weekly podcast features insightful conversations between host Chip Kahn and his guests, who discuss the business of health care, connecting the dots between the health care business, policy, and patients.
The podcast’s first series on AI in health care illuminates how AI is changing health care, and features guests who are deploying this technology, managing its consequences, and designing policy around it.