For our kids’ sakes, give us innovation — not unnecessary regulation

No parent wants to receive the call I got late in the night of Jan. 28, 2025: “Ma’am, you should take your daughter to the emergency room right away.”

The good news? We were already there—because an AI chatbot had recommended the ER two hours earlier while my husband and I waited to hear back from the doctor’s office.

Thankfully, our daughter lost nothing more than her appendix.

And as her parents, we gained not only our happy, healthy daughter back, but also perspective on how modern innovation can make parenthood easier and more enjoyable for any Nebraskan—if government policy doesn’t smother it first.

Since that night last year, the positive potential for families of new technologies and breakthrough developments has only grown.

A few months ago, researchers announced that a daily oral pill can double the median overall survival of metastatic pancreatic cancer patients. Scientists showed that an experimental drug can slow cognitive and functional decline in Alzheimer’s patients by as much as 50 percent.

And how much have you heard about folks suffering from sickle cell disease recently? Probably not a lot, as new treatments can now functionally cure it.

Contrast this with so much of social media, which profits off shattering a parent’s peace of mind by making some one-in-a-million medical tragedy seem far more likely to happen to your child than it really is.

For parents, the steady drumbeat of cancer cured and debilitating conditions alleviated is a perfect excuse to enjoy our kids now rather than worry over endless what-ifs down the road.

Of course, not every improvement needs to have life-or-death consequences. My husband and I homeschool our kids when we aren’t running our own business. That means our days are full of juggling client meetings, co-op classes, work deadlines, and kids’ appointments.

Too often, it’s easy to drown in all those details. But as consumer-facing technology improves, we’re able to spend more of our time and energy teaching our kids or helping our clients while our technological tools take care of agonizing over expense reports and chore charts.

Crucially: These innovations don’t replace me as a mom. They lighten my load and make it easier for me to focus on what’s most important.

Which is why the first danger I see is not technology itself. It’s red tape—heavy-handed rules that lawmakers claim are in our best interest, but which ultimately threaten to strip families like mine of the tools we benefit from.

Earlier this year, legislators in Lincoln considered several bills aimed at regulating AI and other 21^st century technologies. But virtually all of them failed to explain why bad actors shouldn’t be held accountable through laws we already have on the books.

We do not need a fresh stack of regulations that pull useful tools out of parents’ hands or threaten small startups with millions of dollars in compliance costs when irresponsible companies or individual criminals can be punished with existing statutes prohibiting discrimination, fraud, and other bad actions.

Tech-specific bills in Lincoln aren’t the only way that bad policies can strip these tools—or potential cures—from families, either.

Washington can do it with something that barely mentions AI at all: Drug pricing.

Most-favored-nation pricing, or MFN, is a perfect example. Tying U.S. government payments for pharmaceuticals to prices paid by European countries sounds like a bargain. But in practice? Importing foreign price controls can force American patients to endure less access now and fewer treatments later.

Studies show that an MFN pricing regime could cut U.S. drug-innovation revenue by nearly half, resulting in a comparable hit to research and development. Over 10 years, that points to roughly 210 fewer new drug approvals and 290 fewer post-approval indications — about 50 fewer cutting-edge treatments each year.

Those are life-improving treatments and life-saving drugs my kids might never see.

Of course, policymakers in both Lincoln and Washington do not have to choose between affordability and progress or safety and innovation.

Instead, they should lean on existing laws to hold bad actors accountable.

And health regulations should encourage new treatments, not price-control shortcuts that trade tomorrow’s cures for today’s polling boost.

American innovation is giving more kids better health prospects and more parents tools to raise them. For the sake of all Nebraskan families, our policies should encourage more of both.