Topline
Billionaire Mark Cuban urged government agencies and companies on Friday to have artificial intelligence assistants like Anthropic’s Claude or OpenAI’s ChatGPT identify their healthcare benefit contracts for hidden fees and mismatched definitions that drain corporate cash flow.
Mark Cuban, co-founder of Cost Plus Drugs, testifies during the Senate Special Committee on Aging hearing titled “Modernizing Health Care: How Shoppable Services Improve Outcomes and Lower Costs.”
Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
Key Facts
In an interview with Kara Swisher, Cuban said he pushes cities, states and companies to let him look at their contracts and feed the contracts through Claude with a single prompt—”Where am I getting [screwed] over?”—and the tool immediately flags problematic clauses.
Cuban argued health care benefits are the single most actionable cost target for tech companies with over a thousand employees.
“Every penny they save on their healthcare benefits is cashflow that goes right to the bottom line,” Cuban said.
Cuban said vendors exploit the length of healthcare contracts to bury mismatched definitions that add hidden fees or exclude specialty drugs.
Forbes Valuation
We estimate Cuban’s net worth at $6 billion as of Friday.
Key Background
Cuban has spent years positioning himself at the intersection of health care cost reform and technology, becoming a prominent supporter of AI. One of Cuban’s dozens of business ventures includes Cost Plus Drugs, a pharmacy venture he founded to sell generic medications at near-wholesale prices. His company uses AI customer care agents that it says serves “exponentially more patients without adding overhead costs.” Cuban has said he uses AI daily to help with tasks related to his health and his work. However, the billionaire has acknowledged the need to fact check results provided by AI chatbots, which are prone to producing wrong answers and fabricated information. “You’ve got to be careful,” Cuban told High Performance, “it’s like talking to a friend who you think knows a lot about something.”