Billionaire Mark Cuban Says Let’s Take Health Care Back to 1955 — ‘Patients Get a Bill and if They Can Afford It, They Pay That Bill’

An MRI can cost $350. The same MRI can cost $2,500. To Cost Plus Drugs co-founder Mark Cuban, that gap says something important: Health care isn’t just expensive. It’s unnecessarily complicated.

In a 2025 post on Blog Maverick, Cuban argued that America’s health care system has buried a simple transaction beneath layers of contracts, billing systems, and insurance bureaucracy. His proposed fix sounds less like health care reform and more like a Hollywood plot device.

Go back to 1955.

“Hypothetically, it should look like 1955,” Cuban wrote, adding that he picked the year because of “Back to the Future.”

“Patients go to providers for care. Providers provide that care. Patients get a bill and if they can afford it, they pay that bill. That’s it.”

Cuban isn’t criticizing medical innovation.

“I’m not talking about the relentless search for better ways to care for patients,” he wrote. “Whether its surgery robotics or better bandaids, the quest to improve care is vitally important.”

Instead, he argues complexity has become a profit center itself.

“What I’m referring to is the complication of the industry in search of margin dollars,” he wrote.

Where the $5 Trillion Actually Goes

His proposal starts with transparency. Not the kind that buries patients in hundreds of pages of pricing data — but a “bill of materials” showing actual costs from supplies to medical professionals involved in treatment.

He also called for health care contracts to be made public.

“The only way these become simplified, and the only way the people paying for their care turn this into an efficient market is if those contracts are published for all to see,” Cuban wrote.

Cuban then did rough math on where health care dollars disappear. Starting with $5 trillion in annual spending, he pointed to estimates showing administrative costs consume 20% to 30% of the system.

“Most of that is because of the never ending battle between Insurance companies and providers and patients to collect money,” he wrote.

Add another 10% for fraud, overbilling, and upcoding, and the waste compounds.

Yet cash-paying patients frequently receive dramatically lower prices than insured ones.

“Almost every single provider offers lower pricing for cash pay,” Cuban wrote. “Multiple studies have shown savings anywhere from 20 to 70 percent.”

Using those assumptions, Cuban estimated potential savings of roughly $2.5 trillion if the system became significantly more transparent and relied more heavily on direct-payment models.

Turning Transparency into Opportunity

Health care represents about 18% of the U.S. economy, yet consumers have less pricing information than when buying a plane ticket or booking a hotel.

That disconnect creates opportunity.

If transparency wins, companies that help employers manage costs, simplify payments, compare prices, and streamline administration could find themselves in the middle of a massive shift.

Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs is the obvious example — publishing drug costs and markups rather than hiding behind opaque pricing. But the broader play matters more than any single company.

Whoever makes health care easier to understand, easier to compare and easier to pay for wins if transparency becomes a competitive advantage instead of an afterthought.

Health care is one of the biggest expenses Americans face and one of the hardest markets to navigate. Cuban’s answer is surprisingly old-fashioned: Simplify the transaction, show people the costs, and let transparency do the work.

For investors looking at health care disruption, that’s not a throwback to 1955 — it’s a blueprint for what’s next.