'An unstable situation': A conversation with Richard Anderson, M.D., FACP, chairman and CEO of The Doctors Company and TDC Group

The practice of medicine in the United States is changing on multiple fronts at once, and the frameworks meant to govern that change — legal, regulatory and financial — are struggling to keep pace. That is the central argument Richard Anderson, M.D., FACP, chairman and CEO of The Doctors Company and TDC Group, makes in his organization's annual report, "Healthcare on the Horizon: Predictions for U.S. Healthcare Through 2026."

In a conversation with Medical Economics, Anderson covered the most consequential pressures bearing down on physicians today, explaining why artificial intelligence (AI) presents a genuine liability paradox that clinical adoption cannot simply outrun, how nuclear and "thermonuclear" jury verdicts are resetting malpractice expectations across the entire system, and why he believes the country is already inside a rolling access crisis — not approaching one.

Anderson is clear-eyed about what's driving the instability: a health care financing structure that doesn't pay for itself, a legal system built to sue physicians and hospitals but unprepared for agentic technology, and a burnout crisis that gets acknowledged but rarely addressed at its root.

"The system by which health care is practiced is, on one hand, being revolutionized, and on the other hand, being torn apart," Anderson said. "That is a very unstable situation."