If you're an employer trying to reduce healthcare costs, Mark Cuban says your first port of call should be an AI chatbot. The billionaire entrepreneur says large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini can analyze lengthy healthcare contracts and identify where companies are overpaying or being taken advantage of.
"Run them all. Every healthcare contract you have run through Claude or whatever, and just say, 'Where am I getting ripped off?'" Cuban said in an episode of the "Digital Health Heavyweights" podcast that aired on Monday.
He said AI can help level the playing field by making contracts that often run hundreds of pages easier to understand.
"That's why I say use the LLM because our eyes roll back in our heads whenever we try to get into the minutia and the small print of all these 100-page contracts or more," Cuban said. "Every single definition, every single word in your contract is being used to take advantage of you."
Why Cuban distrusts insurers #
Cuban, the cofounder of Cost Plus Drugs, an online pharmacy that aims to make prescription drug pricing more transparent, has long said that health insurers and pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs, drive up healthcare costs through opaque pricing and complex contracts.
His podcast comments echoed a series of recent posts on X in which he said employers have little visibility into what they're actually paying for healthcare.
"There isn't a single company, including yours, that knows the actual cost of the care they purchase for your employees and families. Not one," Cuban wrote on Sunday.
Using an AI model to review healthcare contracts is only the first step, Cuban said on the Monday podcast. Employers also need to understand the financial risks they're taking on rather than assuming insurers act in their best interests, he said. "People default to insurance as if the insurance company's going to give them something more than what they put in," Cuban said. "That's never the case."
He said companies with the financial resources should consider contracting directly with hospitals, clinics, or physician groups rather than relying entirely on traditional insurers. Doing so, he said, allows employers to negotiate lower prices while giving them greater control over their healthcare spending.