Cheaper Than Free

What happens when the most expensive thing in America becomes cheaper than free? Healthcare is the largest cost center in the American economy --- and artificial intelligence is about to invert its arithmetic. Physician-futurist Rubin Pillay traces the trajectory already underway: AI displacement arriving in parallel across the healthcare workforce, a deflationary wave collapsing the cost of diagnosis and care toward zero, and the five-year valley in which the entire transition will be won or lost. The destination he maps is as provocative as it is arithmetically relentless: automation's returns held in collective trust and paid to every American as a dividend of right - a techno-socialist settlement built by markets and owned by all. Cheaper Than Free is the economic playbook for the automation of medicine: what will be displaced, what will deflate, who will try to capture the surplus-and the architecture that decides whether the dividend reaches the public.