Mark Cuban issued a challenge for President Donald Trump’s administration: Break up the biggest health-insurance companies.
Such a move, Cuban said, would make “health care costs drop like that,” while snapping his fingers.
“They have so much control,” he said during a Friday morning conversation with a top Medicare official during the Silicon Slopes Summit. Making them divest from subsidiaries would make costs “drop like a rock.”
Cuban and Chris Klomp, the deputy administrator for Medicare at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, discussed what’s wrong with the health care system and what could lower costs for Americans.
The banter – and sometimes jockeying for a word in – between the two mirrored phone conversations they’ve been having since Klomp saw one of Cuban’s posts to X, they said. Klomp set the tone early by presenting Cuban, who is 67 years old, with a Medicare insurance card the size of a giant donation check.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Mark Cuban of Cost Plus Drugs, center, and Chris Klomp, a top Medicare administrator, discuss drug pricing during the Silicon Slopes Summit at the Salt Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake City on Friday, Feb. 6, 2026.
Cuban and Klomp talked about their entrepreneurial beginnings – like first jobs selling garbage bags door-to-door, or selling sloppy Joes at a state fair – before shifting to prescription medications.
Cuban founded Cost Plus Drugs in 2022 to sell prescription drugs directly to consumers with a small markup. That can save customers a lot of money. In one Cost Plus example, a 30-count supply of 250 milligrams of Azithromycin, commonly known as Z-Pack, sells for $9.37, when it retails at most pharmacies for about $150.
Klomp touted a new government version of that program, TrumpRx.gov, enabling people to buy some brand-name drugs directly from manufacturers.
Such programs are important because big insurance companies “have more control than Chris or President Trump have over drug prices,” Cuban said.
They own the biggest pharmacy benefit managers, he said. Those middlemen manage prescription benefits, including negotiating discounts and processing pharmacy claims.
They also often introduce extra costs, Cuban said, and insurance companies find ways to make money when they can’t do it via the PBMs.
“They know how to game the system faster and better than we can respond,” he said.
The opacity around drug pricing, Cuban said, has led to a lack of trust in the system.
His own companies no longer deal with big insurance firms, he said. Instead, they contract directly with providers — and they’ve posted a blueprint for others to do the same.
Klomp said that the Trump administration is also pushing for more transparency. He hopes that lawmakers, who already have imposed new restrictions on some of the most controversial drug-pricing practices, will do more to help consumers find lower drug prices and have those costs count toward their insurance deductibles.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Chris Klomp, a top Medicare official, Mark Cuban of Cost Plus Drugs and Tyler Jennings, director of Entrepreneurship and Ecosystem Development with the governor's office, from left, gather at the Silicon Slopes Summit at the Salt Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake City on Friday, Feb. 6, 2026.
He added that it’s the government’s role to “create an environment where people can be disrupters.”
Directing the nation’s Medicare program wasn’t Klomp’s aspiration growing up, he said. Before joining Trump’s administration, Klomp was a tech entrepreneur and the CEO of Utah-based health IT company Collective Medical.
Klomp said he “begrudgingly” took the job because Americans are so unhealthy, despite spending huge sums on health care.
Klomp didn’t go so far as to endorse Cuban’s proposal to break up big insurance companies.
To truly make things better, he said, entrepreneurs in the summit audience need to step up and “challenge the incumbents” with start-ups like Cuban’s.