If you thought AI would fix the US healthcare system, Mark Cuban says think again. He said that while AI agents can help doctors, the same technology can also be used by insurers and other healthcare intermediaries to make care more difficult and expensive for doctors and patients.
"For every future agent we give AI doctors to deal with this friction, and to improve the quality of care, the conglomerates will have multiple adversarial agents doing all they can to delay and deny," Cuban wrote in an X post on Sunday.
Cuban was responding to venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who said on X the same day that "AI is already a better doctor than 99.99% of human doctors."
Cuban said the biggest obstacle to improving healthcare is insurers, pharmacy benefit managers, and other healthcare middlemen, which he said already consume a significant share of physicians' time and have every incentive to use AI to protect their profits.
"25 pct or more of a doctor's time is spent dealing with conglomerates that do all they can to make the doctor's care more difficult, and expensive, for both the doctor and patient," he wrote.
AI is already fighting AI in healthcare #
Cuban said the conflict is already playing out.
"We see this already as the conglomerates use AI to find every possible way to manipulate contracts, and find ways to mislead, while hospitals hire companies for Revenue Cycle Management, who charge as much as 10 pct of revenue to have their agents try to do the reverse," he wrote.
Cuban has long said that healthcare intermediaries drive up costs. In 2022, he cofounded the Cost Plus Drug Company, which aims to lower prescription drug prices by bypassing traditional go-betweens and by selling generic medicines directly to consumers with transparent markups.
Cuban likened competing AI agents to "the agentic version of Mad magazine Spy vs. Spy," a long-running comic strip about two rival spies constantly trying to outwit and sabotage each other.
He also said employers have little visibility into what healthcare actually costs, making it harder for AI to optimize spending.
"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," he wrote on X.
Rather than layering AI onto the healthcare system, Cuban said businesses should use AI agents to negotiate and contract directly with healthcare providers, bypassing insurers and other intermediaries.
Until those or intermediaries are removed, he said, AI alone won't fix the industry's biggest problems.