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Start free trial →a16z Podcast · Startups & Venture · October 2026
Julie Yoo suggested AI lets startups build full-stack health plans quickly. Cuban, a self-described AI fan, said AI can't fix a broken financial system once the contracts are signed; its best near-term use is stopping employers from signing bad ones. "BUCAs" is his term for the big insurers.
…to those claims. And the employers have no access to it. And in many cases, they don't even have access to their own claims. It is just so rigged, to your point, Julie, trying to, you know, remove them and disintermediate them is the key, the holy grail to what's happening in healthcare right now.
…all these market forces, and again, like the economics just getting to a breaking point, is the fact that AI can play a significant role in enabling a full stack like health plan offering to be built in a way that reduces all the crux that you're describing in a very short period of time. But this
…and here's where the market, the economics really start to fall apart, and what makes it tough for AI in the short term operationally and less so clinically. The contracts are so big and so long, the BUCAs through their ASOs get to be contractual terrorists. And what I mean by contractual terrorism, the city of Dallas on their PBM contract, I haven't been able to see their ASO contract yet, 1,335 pages. There's no group of humans with enough coffee on the planet to be able to catch everything they try to squeeze by. And so as a result, no matter what AI, once you sign a contract, now hopefully you use AI to prevent yourself from signing a bad contract. And I think that's the low-hanging fruit for everybody. But once you sign that contract with terms you don't fully understand and conditions you don't fully, you can't even protect yourself against, they win. There's no AI in the planet that can protect you.…
And so you went exactly where I was going to go, Mark, which is one of the areas where AI is playing a role for better or for worse is that it is just shining a light on how broken the underlying system that Hume is designed is, right? So the whole like prior off bot war situation that's happening…
bot wars in terms of claims and upcoding and downcoding, that's short-term stuff, right? That's just like, you know, okay, I need to lose some weight. I'm not going to eat, you know, my rice, I'm not going to eat my frosted flakes every day, right? It's nice on the periphery and it's good…
Yeah.