What Mark Cuban REALLY thinks of Medicare for All

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
NPR.

**Ricky Mulvey** (0:06)
Medicare for. All is one of the hottest topics this election season. Do you want a national health insurance program that replaces the private system?

**Adrian Ma** (0:14)
And a lot of Americans are saying, yeah, give me some of that. A poll from The Economist and YouGov found about two-thirds of Americans now support Medicare for.

**Ricky Mulvey** (0:24)
All.

**Adrian Ma** (0:25)
And if you've been to a doctor's office, paid for a brand-name drug or just a health insurance premium, you probably understand why.

**Ricky Mulvey** (0:33)
This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Ricky Mulvey.

**Adrian Ma** (0:35)
I'm Adrian Ma. Today on the show, Part B, we're continuing our conversation about the economics of Medicare for.

**Ricky Mulvey** (0:41)
All. We'll address two questions. One, are we being honest about the cost of Medicare for. All? And two, do we know what we spend on health care right now?

**Mark Cuban** (0:52)
I mean, it's so bad, you can go through a long list of really quality hospitals, and they don't know their costs.

**Ricky Mulvey** (0:58)
That's Mark Cuban. You may know him as an owner of the Dallas Mavericks from Shark Tank.

**Adrian Ma** (1:03)
Mark is also co-founder of Cost Plus Drugs, an online pharmacy that offers transparent pricing on medicines. And Mark has basically stared into the belly of the beast that is the American health care system. And what he saw?
Well, he tells us that after the break.

**SPEAKER_6** (1:21)
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**Ricky Mulvey** (1:56)
For Mark Cuban, the questions about Medicare for. All come down to cost.

**Mark Cuban** (2:01)
I'm all for universal health care, regardless of what form, single payer, Medicare for. All. And the analogy I always use is, if it costs $1 per person per month for universal care, nobody would even question it, right? Everybody would be an automatic yes, because there'd be no reason not to.

**Adrian Ma** (2:22)
Mark said it's difficult to know how much money it would cost or save when there are so many interests in this debate.

**Ricky Mulvey** (2:29)
For example, there's a highly touted paper out from Yale researchers who estimated that a Medicare for. All system would save about 114,000 lives annually and more than a trillion dollars in annual health care spending.

**Adrian Ma** (2:43)
But Mark is doubtful about a major assumption in that paper, something he posted about on X.

**Mark Cuban** (2:48)
Did you see my tweet on that?

**Ricky Mulvey** (2:50)
I did. The Yale study writers assumed that overall fraud in the health care system would go down by $286 billion under a Medicare for. All system and that one health care payer provides fewer opportunities to scam.

**Adrian Ma** (3:06)
$286 billion would be a lot of fraud savings. I mean, that is close to the total sales Costco makes in a year. Mark wondered how they came up with that number for anticipated fraud savings.

**Mark Cuban** (3:19)
And when you go down and look, it was from an article written in 2003 about the chaotic transition of Taiwan in 1995

**Ricky Mulvey** (3:33)
Mark says that a Taiwanese number from 30-something years ago may not be an appropriate comparison to the current American health care system. For example, the Taiwanese health care system was paper-based, not computer-based like ours is.

**Mark Cuban** (3:48)
There's just apples and oranges. You can't apply one to the other.

**Adrian Ma** (3:54)
Still, he believes there could be benefits from a new health care system.

**Mark Cuban** (3:57)
I am not saying that there are not a hundred different ways that universal health care, single payer, Medicare for. All, cannot create savings. There are. But why lie?
Why be unserious in your references in doing this?

**Ricky Mulvey** (4:17)
We talked to Alison Galvani, a co-author of the paper that Mark criticized. Alison is an epidemiology professor at Yale. She's one of the authors who Mark Cuban says is lying and being unserious.

**Adrian Ma** (4:30)
And Alison told us that she had just spent hours on the phone with Mark Cuban before the interview, and she defended using Taiwan as a reference point.

**Alison Galvani** (4:38)
Taiwan shows us what the alternative looks like as the most recent advanced economy to move from a fragmented system like ours to single payer.