Mark Cuban on Pharmacy Prices, Health Care, and ‘Good’ Billionaires
Billionaire entrepreneur, co-host of ABC’s Shark Tank, and Dallas Mavericks co-owner Mark Cuban’s latest venture is the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company. It aims to tackle the high cost and lack of transparency in the pharmaceutical industry by offering cheap generic drugs. When Cuban spoke with Eric Boehm for the second season of Reason‘s limited series podcast Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, he shared the origins of Cost Plus Drugs, the challenges of disruption in the health care sector, and what it means to be a “good” billionaire.
Q: If you were a contestant on Shark Tank, how would you explain the idea of Cost Plus Drugs? What’s the elevator pitch?
A: Who do you trust within the medical supply chain? Your doctor. Do you think the health care system is run properly? Do you trust it at all? If I could show you a business where you could trust it because everything was transparent, would you be more likely to use it? Yes. And if I can show you this business, then show that I saved you money on your medications, would you be willing to tell others? Yes.
Q: There is such a lack of transparency in drug pricing, the idea to just put that information out there seems like it should change the way other people behave. Have you seen that yet?
A: The smartest thing we did was publish our price list, because the people who typically set the pricing—the pharmacy benefit managers—do everything possible to eliminate transparency with their contracts. Well, when we published the price list of what started as 100-plus dru
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