Mark Cuban has spent years criticizing American healthcare from the outside.
Then he built a drug company, Cost Plus Drugs, to prove his point.
Then he wrote a blog post that went viral among healthcare industry insiders for saying out loud what most people in the system already know but rarely say publicly.
The post was titled “A Few Words on Healthcare.” The argument it made was blunt enough to make a lot of powerful people uncomfortable.
What Mark Cuban wrote about American healthcare and the 1955 solution
“Healthcare is a simple business that has been made complicated,” Cuban wrote in a January 2025 post on his personal site, Blog Maverick. “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.”
His proposed fix was delivered without apology.
“Hypothetically, it should look like 1955,” he wrote. “I picked this year because of Back to the Future.”
“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,” Cuban wrote, according to Blog Maverick.
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He was explicit about what he was not saying.
“I’m not talking about the relentless search for better ways to care for patients,” Cuban wrote. “Whether its surgery robotics or better Band-Aids, the quest to improve care is vitally important.”
His target was the financial architecture built around treatment, not the medicine itself. In January 2026, he sharpened the critique further.
“Our health care has become a game of who can rip off who and get away with it,” he wrote on X on January 14, 2026, according to the Washington Examiner.
Why Cuban built Cost Plus Drugs as a direct response to the system he criticizes
Cuban is not simply diagnosing the problem from a distance. The Cost Plus Drugs, launched in 2022, is the operational expression of his healthcare thesis. The company publicly displays the cost of every medication it sells and adds a fixed markup, making the pricing logic visible to every customer.
The approach is designed to demonstrate that transparent pricing and lower costs are not mutually exclusive with a functioning business.
Cuban has argued that pharmacy benefit managers, the intermediaries that negotiate drug prices between manufacturers and insurers, have captured much of the value in the pharmaceutical supply chain without producing corresponding value for patients.
Cost Plus Drugs bypasses that layer entirely.
The company has expanded rapidly since launch and now offers hundreds of generic medications at prices that are often a fraction of what insured patients pay through traditional pharmacy channels, according to Stanford Medicine.
Key context on Cuban’s healthcare argument and the system he is targeting:
- The US spends approximately $4.9 trillion annually on healthcare, more than any other developed nation both in absolute terms and as a share of GDP; administrative costs account for an estimated 34% of total healthcare spending, or roughly $1.7 trillion per year, according to the NEJM
- Cuban’s Blog Maverick post identified hospitals’ practice of raising prices for insured patients when they believe an insurance company will pay above the originally billed amount as a specific mechanism that drives costs higher; the insurer then charges the self-insured employer the elevated amount, creating a cycle that benefits intermediaries at the expense of employers and patients, according to Blog Maverick
- Cost Plus Drugs has expanded to offer more than 1,000 generic medications since its 2022 launch; some of those medications are available for less than $5 for a 90-day supply, compared with prices of $50 to $300 or more at traditional pharmacies, demonstrating the markup that intermediaries add in the conventional supply chain, according to Stanford Medicine
- Cuban appeared at Stanford Medicine’s Department of Medicine Grand Rounds in May 2025, describing the healthcare system as “insanely broken”; he told the audience that providers want to be independent and that eliminating non-clinical administrative tasks from their workload would dramatically improve both physician satisfaction and patient outcomes, Stanford Medicine confirmed
- The 1955 reference in Cuban’s post predates Medicare and Medicaid, which were established in 1965; critics of his proposal have noted that the pre-Medicare era was also a period of significant healthcare inequity, and that any return to simplified billing would require addressing affordability for uninsured and low-income patients alongside the administrative simplification he advocates, according to Blog Maverick readers’ responses
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What Mark Cuban’s healthcare message means for the industry and investors
Cuban’s argument is not primarily a political one.
He is making an economic case that the complexity layered on top of the actual business of healthcare has become a profit center for intermediaries rather than a mechanism for delivering better outcomes to patients.
That distinction matters because it frames the problem as solvable through market structure change rather than through ideological debate about the role of government in healthcare.
For investors, the companies most exposed to Cuban’s critique are pharmacy benefit managers and billing intermediaries whose revenue models depend on the complexity he is targeting. CVS Health, which owns Caremark, and UnitedHealth Group, which owns Optum, have built significant revenue on the layers Cuban describes as unnecessary.
Price transparency regulations and employer-sponsored alternatives to traditional PBM arrangements are already putting pressure on those business models.
The broader implication of Cuban’s 1955 framing is that the next wave of healthcare disruption will not come primarily from new drugs or devices. It will come from companies that find ways to reduce the distance between a patient, a provider, and a price.
Cost Plus Drugs is one early example of what that looks like in practice. Cuban’s argument is that it will not be the last.
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