Who Are the “Bad Guys” in Healthcare? Here’s Mark Cuban’s Answer.

Healthcare is often described as an industry where complexity is unavoidable. We’re told that widespread problems, like care access and affordability, are hard to fix because we’re dealing with such a complex system. But Mark Cuban doesn’t see it that way, as he told Offcall co-founder Dr. Graham Walker on a recent episode of the How I Doctor podcast.

Mark — a self-made billionaire who built his fortune in tech, became a household name on Shark Tank, and is currently running the online pharmacy Cost Plus Drugs — believes that healthcare is, at its core, actually quite simple. We’re fortunate that so many talented, conscientious people choose to become healthcare workers. If they could focus on caring for patients, as they've been trained to do, we’d be golden. The "bad guys," Mark says, are the people and entities who needlessly complicate healthcare transactions:

“Healthcare really is a simple business. It is one of the simplest businesses on the planet. You go to the doctor, hopefully the doctor says nothing's wrong. If there's a complication or some need, the doctor tells you what you need. You need this medication, you need to go to the hospital, whatever it is. And there's really only two questions. What's it going to cost and how are you going to pay for it? That's it. It's just a two-questioned industry.

And what happens is, rather than just keeping it at that simple level, the entire industry, because of this scale, has grown in complication because every complication you add is an opportunity for arbitrage. You get a chance to squeeze your nickel, your dime, your quarter, and you multiply that by some big number and boom, right? Or it might be just a minutia in terms of percentages, times a big number. Somebody's happy all the way to the bank. So when you ask, “Who are the bad guys?” The bad guys are anybody who complicates it because that's where all doctors, physicians, in particular, start to get away from just doing medicine.”

Listen to the full episode of How I Doctor featuring Mark Cuban here.

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Do you agree with Mark’s framing? Is healthcare much simpler than it’s made out to be? Share your thoughts in the comments.