The 15% Trap: How a Single Number Broke Healthcare Pricing

Mark Cuban's Cost Plus Drug Company sells a cancer drug for $47 a month. That same drug often costs well over $2,000 at your pharmacy. Both include a 15% markup. The markup is the same — the price is dozens of times higher, and nobody's asking why.In this episode, I break down why percentage-based pricing is the single most inflationary structural design choice in American healthcare. Not because people are corrupt, but because a math decision made decades ago created a system where every participant — insurers, PBMs, brokers, hospitals, pharmacies — gets richer when costs go up.I identify three distinct "pricing diseases" in healthcare:Percentage Parasitism — when compensation scales with cost, not workChargemaster Fiction — fake list prices with negotiated discounts off fictional numbersOpacity Arbitrage — profiting from the inability of other parties to see the real priceWe're only treating one of them. And I make the case that the AI industry has already solved this problem with per-unit token pricing — they just don't know they solved it for healthcare too.Watch the full video: https://youtu.be/px1eRptDHegFull sources and the deep dive: danmccoymd.substack.com