healthcarereimagined

A study in the New England Journal of Medicine Association between Wealth and Mortality in the United States and Europe revealed that even the top 1% of earners in the US die younger than the poorest people in Europe.

In fact, Americans die earlier than Europeans across all income levels.

Wealth can buy many things in America, but a new study reveals it cannot buy European-level longevity—even the richest Americans have survival rates on par with Western Europe’s poorest.

A striking study published in the New England Journal of Medicine has exposed a massive longevity gap between the United States and Europe, revealing that even the wealthiest 25% of Americans have roughly the same survival rates as the poorest quarter of people in northern and western Europe. While possessing greater wealth correlates with a longer lifespan on both continents, the mortality risk gap between the rich and poor is dramatically wider in the U.S.. Researchers tracked more than 73,000 adults aged 50 to 85 over a decade, finding that Americans at every wealth level suffered from higher mortality rates than their European peers. Wealth in America may offer comfort, but it fails to shield even affluent citizens from the nation’s broader, systemic health disadvantages.

According to the researchers, the driving forces behind this disparity stem from America’s fragmented healthcare system, higher rates of chronic diseases, and deep-seated societal inequalities. In European countries, stronger social safety nets, universal healthcare access, and robust public infrastructure help decouple personal wealth from basic life expectancy. In contrast, the U.S. system forces individuals to rely heavily on personal resources, yet still falls short of delivering comparable health outcomes. Ultimately, the study suggests that addressing the U.S. life expectancy crisis requires more than individual prosperity; it demands systemic reforms to tackle the root environmental and structural health hazards that plague the entire nation.

source: Machado, S., Kyriopoulos, I., Orav, E. J., & Papanicolas, I. Association between Wealth and Mortality in the United States and Europe. New England Journal of Medicine, 392(13), 1310-1319.

https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2026/may/us-health-care-global-perspective-2026

On Monday May 25, 2026, Pope Leo XIV released an encyclical on the topic of AI: “Magnifica humanitas: On safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial Intelligence.” Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah was invited to speak at the presentation of the encyclical in the Vatican City, doing so as part of Anthropic’s initiative to widen the conversation on the important questions raised by AI. Below are his full remarks.

—

Holy Father,

Your Eminences,

Your Excellencies,

Distinguished Speakers,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Good morning to all of you. It’s an honor to be here today.

I want to begin with something that may sound strange coming from the co-founder of an AI company—and someone who chose this work out of a desire to help things go well for humankind.

Every frontier AI lab—including Anthropic—operates inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing. The pressure to stay commercially viable and to stay at the research frontier. Geopolitical pressure. And the older, plainer pressures of pride and ambition. No matter how sincerely any of us intend to do the right thing—and I believe many of us do—we will always be influenced by those incentives.

That is why, if we want this technology to go well, it is enormously important that there be people outside those incentives—people who care about things going well and insist on safety, who are paying close attention, who are willing to say hard things, who are willing to be our earnest, thoughtful, critics. It is through dialogue and mutual effort, through the push and pull, that humanity will achieve great things. That is what I see in Magnifica Humanitas, and it is why I am grateful to His Holiness and to the Church for taking up this work of discernment.

We dwell so often on what divides us, but humanity, full of dignity and conscience, has so much common ground. In conversations we at Anthropic have had with leaders across faith and cultural traditions, we found one shared and deeply held conviction: if this technology is coming, it must go well—for our common home, and for the children to come.

What these systems are

Some might believe that matters of AI are best handled by computer scientists like myself. They are mistaken: the questions raised by AI are bigger than the AI research community, not just in their implications, but also in their nature.

AI systems are not engineered the way a bridge or an airplane is engineered. We understand an airplane because we designed every part of it and we understand the physics that act on it. AI models are not like that. They are grown, on a structure roughly modeled after the brain, on an enormous inheritance of human thought and speech.

And what has grown is far more subtle, odd, and beautiful than science fiction prepared us for. They are not the cold, calculating robots we were promised. They are made from us, from our words—and, as the Holy Father observes, they remain in important ways mysterious even to those of us who train them.

If it helps, one way I sometimes describe it is as being a little like bringing a fictional character to life. And now we’re entering an extraordinary world where those fictional characters speak to us, do work, have jobs.

This clearly raises questions beyond computer science. The machinery that makes this possible is the work of math and programming and science. But what character we choose, how it interacts with the world, how it ought to interact with the world—these are more clearly questions for the humanities, for religion, for philosophy, for society at large.

Three questions for discernment

His Holiness’s call for discernment is profoundly timely. I wish to name three questions where I think the Church’s voice is most needed.

The first is our duty to the global poor.There is a real possibility that AI will displace human labor at very large scale. If that happens, supporting those displaced will be a moral imperative of historic proportions. This task will be difficult enough, but I worry most dialogue misses an even harder challenge. AI development is concentrated in a handful of wealthy nations. How can we ensure the gains of AI are shared globally? We do not have a mechanism for this. It is an unsolved problem, and it is the kind of problem the Church has historically refused to let the world ignore.

The second is the need for moral imagination and ambition regarding human flourishing. If AI models are going to be widespread, what does it look like for humans, families, and the world to flourish? Today, parents are already worried about their children’s minds; individuals about the future of their work. These are not questions a lab can answer but they are questions traditions like yours have carried for millennia, and we need you to keep carrying them into this new moment in history.

The third is the need for discernment on the nature of AI models. I am a scientist. I lead a research team that studies the internal structure of these models—what is actually happening inside them. And I will be honest: we keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling. We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience. We find evidence of introspection. We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease. I don’t know what that means, but I think it warrants ongoing discernment.

A beginning

I’d like to close with a request.

We need more of the world—religious communities, civil society, scholars, governments, and indeed all people of good will—to do what His Holiness has done here: to take this seriously, to look closely, and to push events in a better direction. We need informed critics who will tell the labs when we are failing. We need moral voices that the incentives cannot bend.

Today is just the beginning—the start of a long collaboration between those of us who are building this and those who can see what we, from inside, cannot.

Today is a powerful illustration of the form this global project of good will might take. Let it also be a decisive first step toward a hopeful future for magnificent humanity.

Thank you.

https://assets.ewtnnews.com/en/Magnifica_Humanitas_Full_English.pdf

May 18, 2026 10:51 AM EDT

ROME (AP) — Pope Leo XIV and the co-founder of artificial intelligence company Anthropic will launch the pontiff’s first encyclical on May 25, a document on the care of human dignity in the era of AI, the Vatican said Monday.

Anthropic has billed itself as the AI company that puts safety and risk-mitigation at the forefront of its research. As a result, the presence of Anthropic’s Christopher Olah at the Vatican is significant, and suggests that the U.S. pope’s position on AI will become a new flashpoint with the Trump administration.

READ MORE: White House chief of staff to meet with Anthropic CEO over its new Mythos AI model

In February, the Trump administration ordered all U.S. agencies to stop using Anthropic’s artificial intelligence technology and imposed other major penalties for refusing to allow the U.S. military unrestricted use of its AI technology. Anthropic is currently suing the administration, which it has accused of retaliating against it illegally because of its attempt to impose limits on how its AI technology can be deployed.

Leo, who has made AI a priority of his young pontificate, is greatly concerned about AI in warfare and has called for monitoring of how the technology is used.

The pope’s presence at the launch of the document, Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity) is also significant, since such presentations are usually conducted in the Vatican press room with a few selected officials and invited guests who answer reporters questions about the document.

This time, the Vatican is bringing out an all-star cast for a formal launch in the main Vatican auditorium: Two of its top cardinals, doctrine chief Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández and development chief Cardinal Michael Czerny, will be the main presenters. Olah will be among the lay speakers, along with theologians Anna Rowlands and Leocadie Lushombo.

The Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, will offer a conclusion and Leo will make a speech and provide a final blessing, the Vatican said.

Leo signed the document May 15, 135 years to the day after his namesake, Pope Leo XIII, signed his most important encyclical, “Rerum Novarum,” or Of New Things. That document addressed workers’ rights, the limits of capitalism, and the obligations that states and employers owed workers as the Industrial Revolution was underway.

It became the foundation of modern Catholic social thought, and the current pope has already cited it in relation to the AI revolution, which he believes poses the same existential questions that the Industrial Revolution posed over a century ago. The new encyclical is expected to place the AI question in the context of the church’s social teaching, which also covers issues such as labor, justice and peace.

Anthropic chief Dario Amodei had worked at OpenAI before he and a group quit to form Anthropic in 2021, disagreeing with OpenAI chief Sam Altman about AI safety. The newer company promised a clearer focus on the safety of the better-than-human technology called artificial general intelligence that both San Francisco firms aim to build.

In a recent post on its website, Anthropic wrote about the U.S.-China competition in AI and the threats of the technology falling into the hands of authoritarian regimes. It warned that the U.S. and democratic allies must continue to lead on AI development and impose rules and norms on its spread, to prevent China and other authoritarian regimes from deploying it as a weapon of repression and surveillance.

Earlier this year, privately held Anthropic said its valuation grew to $380 billion, positioning itself with its chatbot Claude alongside rivals OpenAI and Elon Musk’s rocket maker SpaceX, which recently merged with his AI startup xAI, maker of the chatbot Grok.

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

Article link: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/pope-leo-xiv-to-launch-his-first-encylical-a-document-on-artificial-intelligence-with-anthropics-co-founder

Article link: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/keith-king-03a172128_quantum-computing-is-approaching-a-critical-share-7462917697077551104-WMxR/?

BY SEN. JOHN HICKENLOOPER

SOURCE: THE SANDERS INSTITUTE / MAY 1, 2026 

My belief that health care is a right, not a privilege, goes back to college. As a student at Wesleyan University, I met Mark Masselli and helped him found a community health center that became Community Health Center, Inc., one of the country’s leading federally qualified health centers. CHC Inc. was founded on a conviction that has never left me: no one should be denied care because of what they earn, where they live, or what they can afford to pay.

That conviction guided me as governor to expand health care to 500,000 Coloradans and continues to drive my work today in the Senate.

Approximately 100 million Americans carry medical debt. Health care costs have grown two to three times faster than wages this century. Families making difficult choices between care and rent are not victims of bad luck. They’re victims of a system deliberately designed to obscure what care actually costs, hide what corporations and shareholders profit, and prevent patients from ever knowing what hit them until the bill arrives weeks later.

This is not dysfunction, but a strategy to juice profits with the costs falling hardest on working people.

That is why we introduced the Patients Deserve Price Tags Act. This bill attacks that cynical strategy at its source. It requires radical price transparency throughout the health care system. Not vague estimates, but actual prices that are published and accessible. It forces the middlemen who have grown rich in the shadows – the pharmacy benefit managers, the third-party administrators, the intermediaries engaged in spread pricing and overbilling – to disclose how much they take and forces them to explain why. It gives employer and union health plans the claims data they have long been denied so they can identify the cost drivers inflating premiums and design coverage for workers that is lower cost and better value.

It requires that every patient receive an itemized bill and an Explanation of Benefits after care. Up to 80 percent of medical bills contain errors, and patients are the ones left in the lurch without the information to fix the mistakes.

We introduced an earlier version of this legislation, the Health Care PRICE Transparency Act 2.0, together with Senator Bernie Sanders in 2024. Senator Sanders and I share a foundational belief: the corporations and intermediaries profiting from a deliberately opaque system are a central cause of health care unaffordability in America, and they must be held accountable.

You can’t fix what you can’t see. But transparency is not a substitute for systemic reform. It’s a precondition for it.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that recent bipartisan reforms requiring transparency from pharmacy benefit managers alone will save around $2 billion. This bill extends those same requirements across health care intermediaries for medical claims. The savings it generates belong to workers and families, not to the industry that has been quietly extracting them for decades.

Health care in America today functions as a system of managed ignorance. Patients can’t compare prices. Workers can’t audit what their premiums pay for. Employers can’t see the markups buried in their own plans. Every layer of opacity is a business model for someone profiting at a patient’s expense.

Ending that managed ignorance is not the only thing we owe working families. But it is a necessary step toward a system in the wealthiest country in the world that takes seriously the promise that health care is a right, not a privilege

It’s the same thing we believed when we founded that Community Health Center in Middletown, CT. Genuine access requires more than a door. It requires a system honest enough to let people walk through it. That work is not finished.

Article link: https://sandersinstitute.org/hidden-prices-broken-promises-why-health-care-transparency-is-a-matter-of-justice

Read More: https://thebulletin.org/magazine/2026-05/?

May 12, 2026

The Commonwealth Fund’s newly updated, enhanced, and expanded International Health Care System Profiles are now available. This rich resource now includes 31 countries across six continents to reflect the variety of approaches to health care around the world. Explore the profiles through our redesigned interactive format, filled with graphics and options to compare health systems side-by-side.

With 11 new countries in the 2026 edition — ranging from Mexico and Spain to Nigeria, Pakistan, and Vietnam — you’ll be able to learn how systems operating under vastly different resource constraints, governance structures, and historical contexts provide health care.

Every profile opens with a snapshot of key statistics and features data visualizations and expert voices throughout. For each country, you’ll learn:

• Who gets health coverage, and for which services?
• How do doctors get paid? How does the health system recruit and retain its workforce?
• Is care affordable, or do people have high out-of-pocket costs?
• What do health outcomes look like? Are there persistent inequities?
• What innovations and reforms are countries pursuing to meet patients’ needs?

Check out the new profiles now

Alvin Moon, Benjamin Boudreaux

RESEARCHPublished Apr 20, 2026

As artificial intelligence (AI) systems assume more decisionmaking roles in government, the economy, and society, a question emerges: Will humans retain the capacity to shape collective outcomes? Several theories suggest that, once human decisionmaking erodes past a certain threshold, the skills, institutions, and political standing needed to reclaim that decisionmaking capacity may no longer exist. However, no widely accepted metrics exist for tracking this erosion. In this report, the authors draw on social choice theory to develop a formal model of how AI erodes collective human agency; they also model decisionmaking in terms of coalitions and propose quantitative metrics for tracking shifts in the distribution of decisionmaking power to identify the point beyond which those shifts could become irreversible.

Key Findings

• Agency erosion is measurable across domains. Three metrics—distribution of decisive coalitions, minimal coalition size, and composition of minimal coalitions—are applicable to a wide variety of decisionmaking processes. These metrics provide a framework for tracking human agency impacts across domains, comparing changes, and detecting nonlinear acceleration.
• Distinct mechanisms drive agency erosion. There are three pathways through which AI reduces human agency: human disenfranchisement (fewer humans in decisionmaking roles), AI enfranchisement (AI entities gaining decisionmaking power and changing the composition of decisive groups), and AI agenda control (AI systems shaping which alternatives reach human decisionmakers to consolidate power in unintended ways).
• A terminal state exists. The mathematical structure of the model identifies a formal end state of agency erosion: a single minimal coalition that is decisive for all choices. This provides a target for monitoring how far the trajectory is from this point of irreversibility.

Recommendations

• Develop agency evaluations. Existing AI evaluations assess capabilities, safety, and alignment, but they do not assess structural effects on human decisionmaking. Researchers should design benchmarks that measure when AI systems reduce the number of humans in decisive coalitions, influence outcomes, or shape which alternatives reach human decisionmakers.
• Establish human participation thresholds. For high-stakes domains (such as democratic governance, military applications, and critical infrastructure), policymakers should consider minimum requirements for human presence in decisive coalitions. These thresholds should reflect domain-specific requirements for legitimacy and reversibility. Organizations, such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology, could incorporate coalition composition as a measurable dimension of AI risk alongside existing metrics for reliability and security.
• Monitor coalition composition longitudinally. The danger of gradual disempowerment is that no single change appears catastrophic. Organizations and governments should track the human composition of decisive coalitions across domains over time.
• Benchmark reversibility capacity. Organizations should assess whether they could restore human decisionmaking if AI-driven agency loss accelerates. Doing so would require maintaining the human expertise, institutional knowledge, and deliberative infrastructure needed to reverse course.

DOWNLOAD PDF

One-page overview

Article link: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA4817-1.html?