Marketdash
Back to Stock Market News

Mark Cuban Says Healthcare Should Work Like 1955: Doctors Treat, Patients Pay, No Middlemen

MarketDash Editorial Team
4 hours ago
Billionaire investor Mark Cuban thinks healthcare got too complicated and wants to strip away the layers of paperwork, billing codes, and middlemen. In a recent blog post, he argues the system should return to basics: care, a bill, and payment if you can afford it.

Healthcare didn't wake up one day and decide to become impossibly complicated. It arrived there gradually, buried under mountains of paperwork, indecipherable billing codes, and layers of middlemen that nobody actually requested. That mounting frustration is what pushed Mark Cuban, the billionaire entrepreneur and Shark Tank investor, to start writing about it on his personal blog.

In January, Cuban dusted off Blog Maverick after years of silence. "I haven't published anything on here in a long, long time," he admitted. "Thought it would be fun to start up again." The post wasn't meant to be polished policy. "I wanted to give some stream of consciousness thoughts on how I think we can 'fix' the economics of healthcare," he wrote. "Hopefully I make a lot of folks think and make a lot of folks in the industry think harder."

The Problem Is Profitable Complexity

Cuban didn't waste time getting to his thesis. "Healthcare is a very simple industry made complicated," he wrote. The complexity isn't there because it improves patient outcomes. It exists because someone profits from the confusion.

So what should healthcare actually look like? Cuban's answer surprised people with its simplicity. "Hypothetically, it should look like 1955," he explained. "Patients go to providers for care. Providers provide that care. Patients get a bill and if they can afford it, they pay that bill. That's it."

Everything else, in his view, is unnecessary decoration. "The ONLY question in healthcare should be 'How should care for people who can't afford to pay for their care be paid?'" The rest is just noise piled onto what used to be a straightforward transaction.

Where The Money Gets Lost

Cuban took direct aim at how pricing gets deliberately obscured. He criticized bundled charges, absurd markups on basic supplies, and contracts designed to hide real costs. Simply publishing prices doesn't fix anything, he argued, when providers "bundle and upcode and play games."

Insurance companies bear particular responsibility for the distortion. Cuban noted that managing and administering payments alone can add 20% to 30% in overhead, and that's before you account for fraud and overbilling. "That's real money," he emphasized, especially in a system costing roughly $5 trillion annually.

This thinking reflects Cuban's broader business philosophy. He's never been interested in flashy innovation for its own sake. He'd rather strip away unnecessary layers that exist simply because they always have. The real opportunity isn't building complexity but systematically removing it.

Disruption Through Simplification

That instinct led Cuban to launch Cost Plus Drugs, built around transparent pricing and eliminating pharmaceutical middlemen. It's also why he gravitates toward early-stage companies that challenge entrenched industries by making things simpler rather than more sophisticated.

For investors watching the healthcare space, Cuban's argument reads less like nostalgia and more like a roadmap. Sometimes disruption doesn't mean inventing something revolutionary. It means making broken systems work the way people always assumed they did.

Cuban acknowledged his post wasn't a complete solution. "I did all of this in about 90 minutes," he wrote, explicitly inviting criticism and debate.

But the underlying message came through clearly. Progress doesn't always require adding new layers of technology or process. Sometimes it means remembering what actually worked before everything got buried under bureaucracy designed to extract maximum profit from every transaction.

Back to Stock Market News

Mark Cuban Says Healthcare Should Work Like 1955: Doctors Treat, Patients Pay, No Middlemen

MarketDash Editorial Team
4 hours ago
Billionaire investor Mark Cuban thinks healthcare got too complicated and wants to strip away the layers of paperwork, billing codes, and middlemen. In a recent blog post, he argues the system should return to basics: care, a bill, and payment if you can afford it.

Healthcare didn't wake up one day and decide to become impossibly complicated. It arrived there gradually, buried under mountains of paperwork, indecipherable billing codes, and layers of middlemen that nobody actually requested. That mounting frustration is what pushed Mark Cuban, the billionaire entrepreneur and Shark Tank investor, to start writing about it on his personal blog.

In January, Cuban dusted off Blog Maverick after years of silence. "I haven't published anything on here in a long, long time," he admitted. "Thought it would be fun to start up again." The post wasn't meant to be polished policy. "I wanted to give some stream of consciousness thoughts on how I think we can 'fix' the economics of healthcare," he wrote. "Hopefully I make a lot of folks think and make a lot of folks in the industry think harder."

The Problem Is Profitable Complexity

Cuban didn't waste time getting to his thesis. "Healthcare is a very simple industry made complicated," he wrote. The complexity isn't there because it improves patient outcomes. It exists because someone profits from the confusion.

So what should healthcare actually look like? Cuban's answer surprised people with its simplicity. "Hypothetically, it should look like 1955," he explained. "Patients go to providers for care. Providers provide that care. Patients get a bill and if they can afford it, they pay that bill. That's it."

Everything else, in his view, is unnecessary decoration. "The ONLY question in healthcare should be 'How should care for people who can't afford to pay for their care be paid?'" The rest is just noise piled onto what used to be a straightforward transaction.

Where The Money Gets Lost

Cuban took direct aim at how pricing gets deliberately obscured. He criticized bundled charges, absurd markups on basic supplies, and contracts designed to hide real costs. Simply publishing prices doesn't fix anything, he argued, when providers "bundle and upcode and play games."

Insurance companies bear particular responsibility for the distortion. Cuban noted that managing and administering payments alone can add 20% to 30% in overhead, and that's before you account for fraud and overbilling. "That's real money," he emphasized, especially in a system costing roughly $5 trillion annually.

This thinking reflects Cuban's broader business philosophy. He's never been interested in flashy innovation for its own sake. He'd rather strip away unnecessary layers that exist simply because they always have. The real opportunity isn't building complexity but systematically removing it.

Disruption Through Simplification

That instinct led Cuban to launch Cost Plus Drugs, built around transparent pricing and eliminating pharmaceutical middlemen. It's also why he gravitates toward early-stage companies that challenge entrenched industries by making things simpler rather than more sophisticated.

For investors watching the healthcare space, Cuban's argument reads less like nostalgia and more like a roadmap. Sometimes disruption doesn't mean inventing something revolutionary. It means making broken systems work the way people always assumed they did.

Cuban acknowledged his post wasn't a complete solution. "I did all of this in about 90 minutes," he wrote, explicitly inviting criticism and debate.

But the underlying message came through clearly. Progress doesn't always require adding new layers of technology or process. Sometimes it means remembering what actually worked before everything got buried under bureaucracy designed to extract maximum profit from every transaction.