05/18/2025
If you've ever opened a medical bill and wondered how a ten-minute visit costs more than your rent, Mark Cuban's right there with you—only louder, bolder, and a lot less polite about it.
Cuban may have made his billions in tech and sports, but in recent years, he's shifted his sights toward America's other broken empire: healthcare. And during an April episode of the "How I Doctor" podcast hosted by Dr. Graham Walker, he made it clear he isn't here to fix it gently.
"Insurance companies are the worst of the worst of the worst of the worst of the worst," Cuban said. "If you look at how insurance plans are designed, it should be criminal."
He wasn't warming up. He was just getting started.
Cuban, who co-founded Cost Plus Drugs in 2022 to tackle inflated prescription prices, is now taking aim at what he sees as the system's core problem: the way health insurance shifts all the risk onto the people doing the care—and the people needing it.
"If they design a high-deductible health plan and they make it available to somebody with a take-home pay of $25,000, and there's a deductible of $5,000, [doctors] are screwed," he said. "Even if the patient is broke as a joke and doesn't have two nickels to rub together, you still have to care for them."
And once the patient leaves? That debt becomes the doctor's problem, too. "Now you're the one also responsible for figuring out a payment methodology—if there is one."
Dr. Walker, co-founder of Offcall—a platform built to expose pay gaps, reduce burnout, and fight bureaucracy—asked Cuban what he would do if he were in charge. Cuban didn't flinch. His proposals range from common sense to scorched-earth:
- Make medical school free. "$24 billion is nothing," Cuban said. "But it changes the dynamics considerably to improve the quality of care."
- Pay doctors more. "If I'm getting a heart transplant, I want that motherf***ing doctor to make $10,000," he said. "So they're paying attention and not worried about the next heart transplant or the patient with a boo-boo."
- Ditch prior authorizations. "They're designed to drive doctors crazy," he said. "But if you're making an extra $400 million just by stalling, you're going to keep doing it."
But Cuban's rage isn't limited to insurance plans. He also went after hospitals that charge "facility fees" for things that make no sense and the "arbitrage" tactics used by private equity to squeeze doctors dry.
"In healthcare, that $4.9 trillion—wherever anybody can arbitrage whatever they can out of the system—that's exactly what they are going to do," he said.
Cuban's solution? Put power back into the hands of physicians. Create direct-care networks. Cut out the middlemen. Build a virtual hospital if you have to. Just stop pretending the system works.
Because, as he put it: "This whole conversation is about how can we get doctors to be able to golf on Wednesdays like they used to."
