Billionaire Mark Cuban offered up his unsolicited advice to the Trump administration on how to reform Medicaid without making any cuts to the entitlement.
Congress has been trying to figure out how to give President Donald Trump his "big, beautiful" spending bill without making cuts to Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid. Trump himself has said the entitlements would not be touched.
However, DOGE's Elon Musk indicated in a March Fox News interview that entitlements would be on the table, saying, "The waste and fraud in entitlement spending — which is most of the federal spending is entitlements — so, that’s, like, the big one to eliminate. That’s the, sort of half-trillion, maybe $6-700 billion a year."
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Cuban, who owns the Dallas Mavericks and appears on "Shark Tank" alongside Trump palKevin O'Leary, posted on X Wednesday, "I'm against a reduction in benefits for Medicaid recipients. In fact I would like to see them get more benefits. BUT The way the system is currently constructed to move dollars from the fed gov to states and then to beneficiaries, like much of our health care system, is backa-- halfwards."
Cuban continued, "States have learned how to arbitrage current laws to increase their receipts (see provider taxes ), insurance companies and their [pharmacy benefit managers] are still in the middle. Both create a lot of room for cost cuts, not only for taxpayers, but for the entire system. However. Talking about cuts and Medicaid is political suicide. What this really needs to be about is Medicaid Process Simplification. We need to make changes. Let's do what needs to be done across all of healthcare. Simplify it. Remove the arbitrage. Start with the patient, rather from the budget and work down. There is no silver bullet, but there are ways to make improvements and save money @HHSGov."
According to Investopedia, "Arbitrage is the simultaneous purchase and sale of an asset in different markets to exploit tiny differences in their prices."