🎄 Cuban Spotting: The Christmas Dispatch 🎄
Mark Cuban had a busy few weeks. Let's break down what the Patron Saint of Patients was up to and what he's still missing.
THE WINS:
He reposted a great piece on why HR leaders need to rethink their PBM strategies. He called out Elevance for their punitive 10% penalty on hospitals using out-of-network providers and said the quiet part out loud: "Break up the big insurance companies." He's still pushing Cost Plus partnerships with regional insurers like Network Health in Wisconsin.
THE MISSES:
He's excited about HSAs as a hidden UBI program, but here's the thing about HSAs: they assume patients have $3,000 to contribute in the first place. Cancer patients aren't sitting on spare cash to shelter. They're liquidating retirement accounts to cover copays. HSAs are a tax strategy for the healthy and wealthy, not a lifeline for the sick and struggling.
He asked about MACs and claims data ownership, but he's asking LinkedIn instead of asking patients who've watched their data get sold, weaponized, and used to deny them coverage. (We could tell him exactly how that game works because we've lived it.)
And he turned down an opportunity to meet with a targeted cancer patient advocacy community in North Carolina because he "didn't see the value".
THE PATTERN:
Mark keeps speaking TO the system ABOUT patients instead of speaking WITH patients ABOUT the system. Every repost this week was aimed at employers, HR leaders, administrators, and policy wonks. The people who control the money. The people who built the mess. He's trying to convince the arsonists to help put out the fire.
Meanwhile, 20M cancer survivors are starting to organize, ready to apply pressure where it actually matters: ballot boxes and consumer behavior. That's the leverage he's not seeing.
His prediction about AI driving people back to face-to-face engagement is actually brilliant. But here's the patient translation: we've been drowning in algorithmic denials, automated prior auth rejections, and chatbot customer service for years. We already know what happens when machines replace humans in healthcare. People die. The "Milli Vanilli Effect" for patients isn't about authenticity in content. It's about demanding human beings make life-and-death decisions instead of actuarial software.
DEAR MARK: You've got the spreadsheets. You've got the platform. You've got Congress on speed dial. But you're still translating patient pain into business metrics for boardroom consumption. The system doesn't need more convincing. It needs more pressure. And that pressure lives in patient communities you haven't fully tapped yet.
Cost Plus proved transparent pricing works. Now prove that organized patients can move markets faster than lobbying can move legislation.
We're right here. Ready when you are.
Still rooting for you. Still waiting for the call.
Merry Christmas, my friend-to-be!