The ongoing debate over the U.S. health system shouldn\u2019t be based on whether the government or the private sector is the dominant player, billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban said this week. The bigger issue, he said, is whether the system\u2019s participants are transparent about what they charge and what they pay.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not opposed to single-payer or universal healthcare at all,\u201d Cuban said Aug. 18 in an interview with KFF Health News. But \u201cwhen you don\u2019t know all the costs, when there\u2019s no transparency, it\u2019s impossible to determine if it\u2019s a better solution or not,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Cuban\u2019s remarks came on the heels of primary election victories by progressive supporters of \u201cMedicare for All\u201d \u2014 most notably Abdul El-Sayed, who recently clinched the Democratic Senate nomination in Michigan.<\/p>\n
The former majority owner of the Dallas Mavericks and a former investor on the hit TV show Shark Tank<\/em>, Cuban changed the way generic prescription drugs are sold in 2022 by co-founding Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drugs. The website, which posts all its costs and takes a blanket 15% markup, sells thousands of medications, often at deep discounts compared with buying through private insurance plans or self-pay pharmacies.<\/p>\n \u201cWe took the transparent path for an industry where there was zero transparency,\u201d Cuban said. \u201cEverybody else prices to the market; we price to what we thought was fair.\u201d<\/p>\n Cuban said that, in thinking about the broader problems facing the U.S. healthcare system, the key is to rebuild trust. \u201cTrust really is a formula,\u201d he said. \u201cTrust equals transparency divided by self-interest.\u201d<\/p>\n One way to build trust, he said, is to give consumers incentives to find the best price for nonemergency health services. Cuban said that means every medical purchase should count toward health insurance deductibles and out-of-pocket maximums, which is not currently the case.<\/p>\n He also advocates breaking up some of the vertically integrated health companies that have grown so large \u2014 owning insurers, care providers, and the companies that serve them \u2014 that they can dictate their prices. \u201cIf you break up these big, huge conglomerates, everything changes. The price of everything drops like a rock,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n But so far, only a few lawmakers have been brave enough to push that goal, Cuban said, citing the Break Up Big Medicine Act<\/a> co-sponsored by senators Josh Hawley of Missouri, a Republican, and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, a Democrat.<\/p>\n In the end, Cuban said, what matters is not who is running the system but whether all the cards are on the table \u2014 in particular, whether the terms of healthcare contracts are public. Whether it\u2019s the government or private businesses doing the negotiating, \u201cif you don\u2019t know how the deals are structured, it\u2019s impossible to negotiate better ones.\u201d<\/p>\n The interview was part of the \u201cHow Would You Fix It?\u201d series featuring Julie Rovner, KFF Health News\u2019 chief Washington correspondent and host of the What the Health?<\/em> podcast.<\/p>\n An abbreviated version of this interview aired Aug. 20 in Episode 460<\/a> of What the Health? From KFF Health News<\/em>: \u201cHeadless FDA Gets a New Nominee.\u201d<\/p>\n KFF Health News<\/a> is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF\u2014an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n This article<\/a> first appeared on KFF Health News<\/a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The ongoing debate over the U.S. health system shouldn\u2019t be based on whether the government or the private sector is the dominant player, billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban said this week. The bigger issue, he said, is whether the system\u2019s participants are transparent about what they charge and what they pay. \u201cI\u2019m not opposed to single-payer…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":15184,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15183"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15183"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15183\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}