“I hope people realize that for the foreseeable future, the cost of healthcare benefits will get more people fired, or not hired, than AI,” wrote Cuban, who co-founded the online discount pharmacy Cost Plus Drugs.
As for who’s to blame, Cuban pointed in March at giant, vertically integrated insurers swallowing most of that spending. He wants them broken up — and there’s already a bipartisan bill in the Senate that would take a swing at it.
What employers are actually paying for coverage
Employers and their workers paid an average of $26,993 for family coverage in 2025, up 6% or $1,408 from a year earlier, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s annual survey of more than 1,800 employers. The health policy nonprofit found workers themselves covered $6,850 of it, and some 154 million Americans under 65 get their coverage this way.
There was no relief in sight, either. When the survey came out on Oct. 22, 2025, insurers were already asking for double-digit rate increases on individual and small-group plans, and KFF warned the hikes could spill over to large employers next. “There is a quiet alarm bell going off,” KFF President and CEO Drew Altman said at the time, pointing at GLP-1 drugs, hospital prices and tariffs.
Do healthcare costs really kill jobs?
A National Bureau of Economic Research working paper from researchers at the University of Chicago, Yale, the U.S. Treasury and other institutions backs Cuban up on this one. The team tracked what happened to companies after nearby hospital mergers pushed up the price of care, and found that every 1% rise in healthcare prices trimmed payrolls and headcount by 0.4% at employers outside the health sector — in effect, the researchers concluded, a payroll tax.
People earning between $20,000 and $100,000 a year absorbed most of those cuts, while six-figure earners barely felt them, the authors found. And companies mostly cut jobs outright, the paper says, since workers won’t take a pay cut to cover a benefit that didn’t get any better.
So why does AI get the blame?
To be fair, AI really is showing up in the layoff numbers. U.S. employers announced plans to cut more than 97,000 jobs in May — the most for that month since 2020 — and named AI as the main reason for 40% of them, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. By the end of May, companies had announced 87,714 job cuts tied to AI, more than in all of 2025, Moneywise reported.
Still, the broader job market didn’t crack. U.S. payrolls grew by 172,000 that same month, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the unemployment rate held at 4.3%.
“It’s far easier to blame AI than it is to blame Healthcare costs,” Cuban wrote back in March.
