Mark Cuban: Cut Healthcare Costs and Pay Doctors More

On a recent episode of How I Doctor, Offcall founder Dr. Graham Walker talked to Mark Cuban — the business mogul, former MBA owner, and online pharmacy CEO — all about the economics of healthcare. Mark sees budget bloat throughout the sector. But one area where over-spending isn't an issue? Physician salaries. Quite the opposite. Mark wants to cut costs elsewhere so we can pay doctors and other healthcare workers more:

“Let me just tell you: Doctors are underpaid. When I look at individual bills, like a heart transplant: $25,000. Amount paid to the doctor: $2,200, for literally taking a heart out. If I’m getting a heart transplant, I want that motherf*cking doctor to make $10,000, so that he or she is paying attention, and not worried about getting to the next heart transplant or worried about the patient who’s got a boo-boo. It’s a f*cking mess.”

If Mark were in charge of reining in healthcare spending, he’d start by targeting big insurance companies — “the worst of the worst of the worst of the worst” — for practices that increase their profits and protect them from taking on risk while creating needless complications and expenses for other groups (and for the whole system).

Here’s one example:

“I talked to CFOs at hospital networks and I'm like, okay, let me get this straight. You have a contract with one of the big insurance companies. And that contract for a hip replacement, to pick one out of left field, is $15,000. When you do the hip replacement, they don't just pay you $15,000, assuming it's normal. They say, “We’re not going to pay you $15,000. We're going to pay you $13,000, despite the fact that you have a contract.” And the CFO's like, “Yeah. That's what they do. They just underpay and make us fight for it.”

Now what does that mean in terms of the cost of healthcare to this country? It means that hospital has to have lawyers; they have to have all these

administrative people checking all the bills. And you can use AI or not, you know, but you're going to have to have people there checking and reviewing, and when you hear all these discussions about the administrative cost, as a percentage of the $4.9 trillion being anywhere from 20, 30, maybe 40%, that's where that comes from.”

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

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How would you lower healthcare spending, if you were in charge? Let us know! Share your cost-cutting ideas in the comments.