Mark Cuban urges employers to use AI for contract audits

Mark Cuban argues that the most immediate application of AI in healthcare is for employers to audit their existing benefits, PBM, and TPA contracts before signing or renewing them. He notes that large vertically integrated carriers like UnitedHealth, which has over 3,000 subsidiaries and $150 billion in annual intercompany transfers, engage in 'contractual terrorism' with documents up to 1,335 pages long, making it impossible for humans to detect all unfavorable terms. Cuban claims that running these contracts through AI agents can reveal how employers are being overcharged within seconds. He asserts that if 67% of employers representing over 160 million Americans performed this audit, the cost of healthcare would drop significantly. He also highlights that AI is currently most impactful on the contractual side rather than the clinical side, as the underlying financial system remains broken by lack of price discovery and opaque data silos. Cuban maintains that AI cannot fix broken healthcare economics on its own but is the essential tool for exposing contract exploitation and reducing costs for employers and consumers.