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Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban used a blunt social media post on Tuesday to question why taxpayers routinely backstop college, business and mortgage loans but offer nothing comparable when families face large medical bills. Mark Cuban Urges Taxpayer-Backed Loans For Medical Care The founder of digital pharmaceutical marketplace, Cost Plus Drugs, said Americans should be just as willing to help finance health costs as they are other life expenses. On X, Cuban wrote, "American Taxpayers will loan you money to go to college and drop out the first semester. Start a business that fails within the year. Buy a house that you can't afford to keep up. But if you get into a horrendous car wreck and can't afford your healthcare insurance deductible…Thoughts and Prayers to You." Cuban's post amounts to a push for some form of public or publicly backed financing that helps patients cover deductibles and other out-of-pocket costs, an idea he has paired with calls for more price transparency and direct payment options in health care. Cuban’s Attack On Drug Middlemen According to a report by Fierce Healthcare, at the HLTH conference this week in Las Vegas, Cuban renewed his critique of pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), drugmakers and wholesalers, arguing that their opaque contracts inflate medicine prices and squeeze patients and independent pharmacies. See Also: Bernie Sanders Slams Jeff Bezos For Reportedly Replacing 600,000 Amazon Jobs With Robots: ‘That’s The Direction Of Every Major Corporation’ He's repeatedly argued that manufacturers selling to wholesalers at list prices — filtered through PBMs — leads to higher costs for pharmacies and patients and says transparency and competition can lower prices. Pushes Transparency And Competition To Lower Costs Cuban has also diverged from partisan talking points at times. Earlier this week, he offered measured praise for the Trump administration's drug-pricing platform, calling "TrumpRx" a "good start" while stressing it falls short of the systemic overhaul he envisions. His outpour on Tuesday followed other recent posts highlighting how high deductibles can render insurance unusable for many households, a theme he's raised in interviews and forums. "The only financial questions in healthcare are: What does it cost, and how do you pay for it," he wrote in a separate post last week, urging employers and policymakers to simplify answers to both. Cuban has also waded into hot-button debates. Responding directly to Fox News commentator Tomi Lahren this month, he argued that stabilizing a patient in an emergency room is "triage," not health care and criticized both parties for politicizing coverage while families struggle with medical debt. Read Next: Trump Says Justice Department Owes Him A ‘Lot Of Money’ And He Could Donate Or Use It For Ballroom Project Photo Courtesy: Kathy Hutchins on Shutterstock.com
