The End of Scarcity Medicine: How AI Rewrites Who Gets to Be Healthy

The End of Scarcity Medicine argues that artificial intelligence in healthcare is being deployed in the wrong place by the wrong actors for the wrong reasons, and that getting the deployment right is the most important health equity question of our generation. Babu George contends that American medical inequality is engineered, not natural, that the architecture of access produces the outcome distribution we see, and that AI offers, for the first time in modern history, a real path around the institutions that have rationed medical reasoning for over a century. Drawing on twenty-five years of experience in higher education and federally funded health equity programs, the book takes seriously what AI can and cannot do, examines the political economy of the institutions that will resist its equitable deployment, and lays out a concrete vision for what abundance medicine could look like if it were built as public infrastructure rather than absorbed into existing private systems. The book is for clinicians, policymakers, technologists, patient advocates, and any reader who has watched American medicine fail the people it should be serving and wants to understand what could be done about it. Readers will leave with a clearer view of why incremental reform has failed, what the technology actually changes, who will fight to preserve the existing arrangement, and what political coalitions can be built to fight back. It is a book of arguments, with stakes and conclusions, written for readers who are tired of the sanitized version of the AI healthcare conversation.