> If Cuban's idea is "we don't do insurance but you're free to pay with an HSA card or seek reimbursement from your insurance company" then this could be a huge winner.

This is the way it works for a lot of therapy and mental health services and it’s horrible. Prices are absolutely insane, practitioners are not accommodating to patient schedules, and patients have absolutely zero bargaining power.

In some ways doing it through insurance is kind of like a union. You all agree to accept certain inefficiencies, bureaucracy, etc., (and associated cost) in order for better collective bargaining terms.

Of course people with great jobs usually don’t care about unions. They don’t need the collective bargaining power and thus figure the bureaucracy cost is just a loss they don’t need.

Same thing with very healthy people and insurance. If you’re healthy you just figure, give me cheap catastrophe insurance, what do I care? But if you’re in the depths of the medical industrial complex because you need frequent treatment for chronic conditions, you quickly learn that papering everything over with lots of bureaucracy to adhere it to better collective bargaining for patients is way better, and I’d rather take the nasty, churning quagmire of price inflating insurance than deal with spartan libertarian mini-insurance that essentially just results in rich-get-richer (i.e. genetically lucky healthy people just get to save money while everyone else suffers).