Insights

New York – January 16, 2024: Linda Malek, Jason Johnson and Blaze Waleski are joining Crowell & Moring’s Health Care and Privacy & Cybersecurity groups and will be based in the New York office.

On June 22, 2026, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.) and Ranking Member Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) announced a bipartisan agreement on a revised version of the KIDS Act (H.R. 7757), marking the most significant congressional advance on children's online safety legislation in years. The House passed H.R. 7757, as amended, on June 29, 2026, setting up a potential showdown with the Senate. The revised KIDS Act consolidates elements of 14 pending legislative proposals — including KOSA and COPPA 2.0, both of which have previously passed the Senate and cleared the House Energy and Commerce Committee — into a single, comprehensive framework. The announcement, however, was met immediately with objections from Senate sponsors and civil liberties groups, underscoring the difficult legislative road ahead.

Colorado’s original AI Act (SB 24-205), signed in May 2024, imposed broad obligations on developers and deployers of “high-risk AI systems” — including requiring risk management programs, impact assessments, and affirmative steps to prevent algorithmic discrimination across employment, housing, lending, insurance, health care, and education decisions. The operative date for SB 24-205 was extended twice, and a court temporarily suspended enforcement in early 2026, following a lawsuit filed by xAI, which the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) intervened to support. Industry feedback on SB 24-205 was generally negative. In response to this environment, Colorado’s legislature undertook a rewrite, drafting and passing SB 26-189 in a matter of weeks. SB 26-189 reflects the legislature’s effort to preserve the policy goal of filling the AI oversight vacuum given the lack of a comprehensive federal law, but within a more workable compliance framework.

The appropriate use of AI tools during the claims review process continues to be a major topic of debate within the health care industry — but in recent weeks, emerging litigation has inspired critics to turn their attention specifically to the technology’s application within federal health programs. On March 25, 2026, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a lawsuit against the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), citing the agency’s alleged failure to answer a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for records the EFF believes will provide crucial insight into the design, safeguards, vendor relationships, and real-world performance of the Medicare Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction (WISeR) Model, CMS’s  AI-driven prior authorization pilot program for certain Medicare services.