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Mark Cuban Explained Why AI Is Going to Make Your Healthcare More Expensive
Mark Cuban offered a scorching rebuttal to tech optimists who claim AI is about to streamline healthcare and bring down drug prices.
EXPERT OPINION BY JESSICA STILLMAN, CONTRIBUTOR, INC.COM @ENTRYLEVELREBEL
Jul 30, 2026
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AI boosters tout many ways AI advances will make healthcare better and cheaper. The technology will improve telemedicine, streamline bureaucracy, and assist doctors in making more accurate diagnoses, they promise. But one prominent voice in the healthcare space just threw cold water on these rosy projections: Mark Cuban.
The serial entrepreneur and generally outspoken billionaire is no stranger to the healthcare space. His latest venture, Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drugs, is dedicated to breaking the stranglehold of middlemen on pharmaceutical pricing and offering better deals to consumers.
He is, in other words, a guy who knows a ton about how all the players in the healthcare ecosystem use technology to set prices. And he has bad news people hoping that AI will make drug prices less astronomical.
The healthcare AI agent arms race heats up
On X recently, Cuban responded to a post from VC Marc Andreessen claiming that “AI is already a better doctor than 99.99 percent of human doctors” and “This is good news.” The former Shark Tank star had a much less optimistic take on the role of AI in healthcare.
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It’s actually not good news, he insisted. “Because 25 percent 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.”
You might think enlisting AI agents to do battle with these price-raising behemoths would give doctors an edge in the on-going price war. But it’s not just patient-minded providers who will adopt AI. So will the conglomerates. And they will use these new tools to keep prices high.
“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,” Cuban warns
