Originally published on Becker's Hospital Review on Thursday, January 4th, 2024
Written by Molly Gamble
Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban has made substantial progress in the healthcare and pharmacy space in nearly four years, and he's learned a lot about its costs for employers and workers in that time, too.
Mr. Cuban co-founded Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Co. in May 2020 with Alex Oshmyansky, MD, PhD. The online pharmacy launched eight months later and today offers more than 2,000 of the most highly utilized and/or high-cost generic medications. The drugs are sold with a 15% markup for price, a $5 fee to pay the pharmacists it works with and a $5 fee for shipping. The prices are significantly less than what Americans typically pay through insurance.
The company and its growing list of partners brought Mr. Cuban closer to self-insured employers and their CEOs, most of whom "don't know and don't really want to know where their healthcare benefit dollars are going," he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, Jan. 3.
Mr. Cuban said CEOs are indifferent to healthcare outcomes because they are not viewed as a core business competency. "As a result they waste a sh-tload of money on less than quality care for their employees, and more often than not it's their sickest and lowest paid employees that subsidize the rebates and deductibles," he said.