Mark Cuban, a Shark Tank investor, entrepreneur, and outspoken personality, holds views on innovation from disrupting the traditional U.S. healthcare system.
Turning his spotlight into the wider American healthcare system, Cuban realized in 2025 and outlined a provocative idea. Like in the year 1955, patients were dealt with care and treatment before handling the medical bills. He mentioned that the system in the late 1970s was better off than it is today.
According to Mark Cuban, the simple model of Cost Plus Drugs strips away the layers of middlemen, opaque structure, and complexity. This has made today’s healthcare expensive and disconnected from the ones who need it the most.
Instead of directly pitching a reform blueprint, Cuban argued that he wants to challenge traditional assumptions on how healthcare must work.
Mark Cuban dreams of returning to the same care-for-service transaction process, one where the center of the system is not lost under a huge mountain of money, insurance mandates, and overheads. Moreover, it is like a lens from the viewpoint of economics and incentives.
From Simplicity to Complexity: Cuban’s 1955 Healthcare Ideal
In one of the recent posts by Blog Maverick, Mark described how the healthcare industry has grown from a straightforward consumer-products/services industry into a system driven by profit.
It is also driven by bloat and pricing games, and hence he added by mentioning that healthcare is a simple industry made complicated. Furthermore, he shows what it should look like.
The healthcare analogy of 1955 and Cuban’s hypothetical model enables an era where patients receive industry care from the providers.
Hospitals and doctors would render services to the needy people first, and after the treatment was done, patients were billed. Thus, if the patients could pay, they can carry on, while for the ones who are not insured and lack the resources, society will figure out a way to pay for them.
Mark realized that everything surrounding the healthcare system, including complexity, intermediaries, and billing, is just noise covered in one simple charge.
Undoubtedly, this model is just a core transaction, and the bill is just a record of that transaction. Furthermore, Cuban argues that people cannot pay for the services when they cannot afford the treatment.
What Changed Since 1955? Complexity, Middlemen, and Hidden Costs?
Mark acknowledges the fact that today’s healthcare system did not happen all of a sudden. Rather, it evolved as numerous stakeholders integrated them into the system. Now, instead of improving care, most of these layers serve to obscure actual prices.
Bundled Charges and Hidden Pricing
Listing some of the hidden charges, rebates, and more.
- In modern healthcare techniques, invoices often combine multiple charges together. Further ensuring that patients do not understand what they are paying for.
- A 15% fixed markup on basic medical supplies, add-on charges inflating costs, and administrative fees.
- Additionally, even when prices are printed, they are mostly hidden behind complex maths and diagnostic-based billing.
Mark Cuban further argues that simply publishing the price is not enough. While every insurer, middleman, and provider is part of the system, they use bundling and upcoding. Markedly, actual pricing would need to eliminate the layers of complexity, which is the central mission.
The Role of Insurance
Mark argues that insurance companies are one of the largest sources of exploitation in today’s healthcare economics. At the same time, claims administration and payment management can add up to 20% to 30% to the overhead charges.
High-deductible plans encourage this problem, as even the insured payments struggle to afford this care because the deductible is outside their reach. In fact, in this particular case, insurers provide little help to the patients and then chase payments via the billing process.
Cuban’s Core Critiques of Modern Healthcare
Let’s list some of the critiques of modern healthcare according to Mark Cuban.
1. Excessive Administrative Bloat
Mark Cuban understands the difference between administration and care delivery. Hence, in his viewpoint, many dollars are used for administrative work and not for patient care.
The people who are actually providing care, like doctors, become bill collectors, rather than giving care and treatment. They chase payments from patients and insurers in the same manner. However, he also argued that this transformation makes the healthcare system so inefficient.
2. Obscured Pricing and Lack of Transparency
Healthcare includes hidden prices until the treatment is done, which is unlike most service industries, where consumers know the price of a particular service or product. Even, they make bills indecipherable.
As per Mark Cuban, this lack of transparency protects intermediaries while leaving patients helpless in the dark.
Conclusion
Cuban is not offering a detailed legislative blueprint or cost-sharing mechanism in his 1955 healthcare vision. Instead, he’s proposing a philosophical baseline: care should come before complicated financial engineering.
From this baseline, policymakers and stakeholders could explore hybrid systems that preserve care access while reducing complexity.
