Mark Cuban's 'warning' to Americans: AI risks making US healthcare worse as there is not a single company that ...
Mark Cuban has warned that artificial intelligence (AI) alone will not solve problems in the US healthcare system. The billionaire entrepreneur has argued that the technology could also be used by insurers and other healthcare intermediaries to make treatment approvals and payments more difficult for doctors and patients.
Cuban made the comments while responding to venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who wrote on X that: "AI is already a better doctor than 99.99% of human doctors.” Cuban said that AI can certainly help doctors improve patient care, but said insurers and other healthcare organisations are also likely to deploy competing AI systems.
He added that healthcare companies already use AI in ways that create additional hurdles, and he believes wider adoption of AI agents could increase those challenges unless the role of intermediaries changes. “There isn't a single company, including yours, that knows the actual cost of the care they purchase for your employees and families,” Cuban wrote, replying to Anderssen’s post.Read Marc Cuban’s full message about AI risks in US healthcare systemResponding to Andreessen’s post, Cuban wrote: “It's not.
Why? Because 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. 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, to minimize their cost and maximize their float 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.
It's the agentic version of Mad magazine Spy vs Spy I'll give you a further example. 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. Cost is an important component of health care decision making. @a16z includes costs in defining its benefits.
But you are blind to all but the total bill you pay. Your carrier, your ASO, your PBM, any company that touches the economics of care for your company is going to do everything they can to prevent you from using AI doctors or agents successfully If you want to see that change, stop working with the healthcare conglomerates.
Write agents that define, optimize and contract directly with providers, to eliminate the uncessary middlemen. Feel free to use http://costpluswellness.com to train them. Until the conglomerates are disintermediated , HC in this country will continue to be f**ked.”Cuban has previously criticised the role of healthcare intermediaries in increasing medical costs.
In 2022, he co-founded Cost Plus Drug Company, which sells generic medicines directly to consumers with transparent pricing by bypassing traditional intermediaries.Get the latest technology news and updates. Download the TOI App.