Washington (October 9, 2025) - Senator Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) today introduced the Right to Override Act, legislation that would protect patients and health care workers by requiring an option for human override of artificial intelligence (AI)-based systems that recommend clinical decisions in health care settings.
AI is increasingly used in health care settings to recommend treatments, diagnoses, or procedures for patients. Even though AI can be untested or biased, doctors, nurses, and other health care providers are often unable to override AI decisions, or they can face sanctions for doing so—creating dangerous situations for health care workers and patients. The Right to Override Act would require health care facilities and health plans to create a human override option for AI-fueled decisions and protect health care workers who disagree with an AI recommendation while providing care in their best judgement for the patient.
“Patients deserve to know that the decisions being made about their health are made by trained, qualified professionals—not faulty AI algorithms,” said Senator Markey. “And health care workers deserve the dignity to exercise their professional judgement and the security of knowing that they will not be fired for disagreeing with untested and potentially biased AI systems. We cannot let the safety of patients and health care workers be sacrificed at the altar of Big Tech.”
“As Big Tech and large health care corporations seek to adopt Artificial Intelligence technologies at breakneck pace in virtually every aspect of health care, nurses believe it’s imperative we fight to protect our patients from the harms of these technologies. Instead of prioritizing staffing hospitals safely and investing in retaining and recruiting nurses to provide direct hands-on quality care, health care corporations aim to increase profits by cutting nursing staff, removing us from direct care, and deskilling and degrading our professional practice by replacing our clinical judgment with A.I. Let us be clear, nurses’ clinical expertise cannot and should not be automated. National Nurses United applauds Senator Markey’s Right to Override Act, as it will put in place critical protections for nurses to override artificially generated clinical predictions that do not align with a nurse’s clinical knowledge as to what is best for our patients. Nurses are patients advocates first and we must have the right to exercise our clinical expertise to provide our patients with the best care,” said Mary Turner, RN, President of National Nurses United.
The bill is cosponsored by Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and endorsed by National Nurses United (NNU), AFT, and the Communications Workers of America (CWA).
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