...to the point where it is the most expensive and most complicated in the world. The insurance industry has shoved itself as a greedy and inhumane middleman between the patient and the provider. Health and profit are incompatible.
Marc Cuban is absolutely right.
I am familiar with medical care in the country of Lebanon because I often seek care in it (I avoid the American healthcare system as much as I can). Doctors are excellent, and they treat you with respect; they listen to you and engage with you in a discussion about your condition. In the US, I feel I am being infantilized and my opinion and questions are treated with snobish scorn. Lebanese doctors are trained in a scientifically rich cross-cultural hybrid European-American medical education system and care is relatively inexpensive.
Lebanon has become a hub for healthcare for people from around the region. But the heathcare system is being slowly "Americanized" by transitioning it from the traditional simple patient-provider relationship that Cuban is advocating (see below) to one where greedy and savage insurance companies call the shots in a country that has not yet regulated the industry. Traditional doctors that treat patients with compassion are being gradually replaced by a physician-insurance cartel that deliberately complicates things to retain control over pricing and which, among other unethical "marketization" schemes, promotes expensive (because unsubsidized by the state), useless and scientifically untested supplements instead of regular scientifically approved drugs. Right now, when I visit this country for medical care, I still have a choice between the two systems, but not for long.
In the US, people - especially seniors - are constantly bombarded with commercials for drugs with new names for new diseases. On television, it's one commercial after another that end with "ask your doctor if this or that drug is right for you", followed by a fast-paced recitation of all the ills, including death, that this or that drug can cause you. Why should the patient be told to be a student of pharmacology, to compare and contrast dozens of drugs for the same condition, then tell their doctor which one they prefer? This is an aberration. Only the doctor should, in good conscience and with science-backed reasoning, decide what drug is suitable.
Occasionally, my US health insurance company sends me home tests I never asked for, just because I fall within a given statistical range. It then bombards me with phone calls and letters to get me to do the test, without any input from my doctor. I never hear anything from my doctor. This is but one example of why the US healthcare system is so expensive and unaffordable. Bureaucratic waste, too many middlemen trying to suck every penny out of both doctors and patients.
Then, every fall, my insurer sends me a 50-page book with glossy hard paper, full of fancy graphics and photos of smiling people, almost like a fashion magazine. In this book, I have to find which diseases and conditions they will stop covering, or those they will charge higher deductibles or co-pays for, and which one of their two dozen plans I need to change to. Americans have to live with the anxiety of deciding every year which diseases they think they will have during the next 12 months of coverage, and if necessary, to change to a new plan with a new card and a new mountain of junk mail that comes with it. And they say it is the best healthcare system in the world.
BUT I want to make sure to emphasize that there is a difference between US scientific and medical research on one hand, and the disgusting healthcare practices of the insurance industry cartels.
US medical research is top notch because it is well-funded. But Donald Dumb is killing it by upending the central dogma of US scientific research:
Taxpayer money (per yearly budget allocations) go to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foudnation (NSF). These provide grants to university researchers whose discoveries are made public (through publications in scientific journals), and in turn are passed on to drug manufacturers who develop the medicines, procedures and tests.
Donald Dumb has curtailed the monies allocated to NIH and NSF and is attacking universities on backward ideological grounds, and he's attacking the drug manufacturers as well. For example, Donald Dumb is defunding all messenger RNA research which is almost one of the miracles of science, simply because the voodoo shaman imbecile RFK Jr doesn't like the Covid vaccine. That is what happens when you give control of complex science matters to ignorant human beings.
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Billionaire Mark Cuban Wants U.S. Healthcare To Go Back To 1955. Doctors Provide Care, Patients Get A Bill —'And If They Can Afford It, They Pay'
Jeannine Mancini
Tue, December 23, 2025
Healthcare didn't become confusing overnight. It got there slowly, buried under paperwork, billing codes, and middlemen most patients never asked for. That frustration is what Mark Cuban, the self-made billionaire and longtime Shark Tank investor, decided to unpack on his own — without being asked.
In January, Cuban returned to his personal site, Blog Maverick, after a long stretch of silence. "I haven't published anything on here in a long, long time.. Thought it would be fun to start up again," he wrote. He said the post was meant to be informal and exploratory. "I wanted to give some stream of consciousness thoughts on how I think we can ‘fix' the economics of healthcare.. Hopefully I make a lot of folks think and make a lot of folks in the industry think harder."
From there, Cuban went straight to what he sees as the core problem. "Healthcare is a very simple industry made complicated," he wrote, arguing that the complexity isn't driven by better care but by the pursuit of margin dollars.
When Cuban asked what healthcare should look like, his answer was intentionally retro. "Hypothetically, it should look like 1955," he wrote. "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."
In his view, everything else is secondary. "The ONLY question in healthcare should be ‘How should care for people who can't afford to pay for their care be paid?'" he wrote. The rest, he suggested, is noise layered onto a transaction that used to be straightforward.
Cuban also took aim at how pricing gets obscured. He criticized bundled charges, markups on basic supplies, and contracts so complex they hide real costs. Publishing prices alone doesn't solve it, he argued, when "everyone bundles and upcodes and plays games."
Insurance companies, he wrote, are a major source of that distortion. Managing and administering payments alone can add 20% to 30% in overhead, before accounting for fraud and overbilling. "That's real money," Cuban said, especially in a system he estimates costs about $5 trillion a year.
That line of thinking mirrors how Cuban tends to approach business more broadly. He's less interested in flashy solutions than in stripping away layers that exist mainly because they always have. The opportunity, in his view, isn't inventing complexity but removing it.
That instinct is what led him to launch Cost Plus Drugs, a company built around transparent pricing and cutting out middlemen in pharmaceuticals. It's also why he's long been drawn to early-stage companies that challenge entrenched industries by simplifying how things work. For investors watching healthcare, Cuban's message reads less like nostalgia and more like a signal that disruption often starts by making broken systems behave the way people assumed they already did.
Cuban made clear he wasn't offering a finished blueprint. "I did all of this in about 90 minutes," he wrote, inviting criticism and debate.
But the takeaway was unmistakable. Progress doesn't always come from adding something new. Sometimes, it comes from remembering what worked before everything got in the way.
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