15 ms·

Mark Cuban's pharmacy started with a cold email

202 points by betocmn 5y ago

HL33tibCe7 5y ago
If you’re on mobile, where the site is a little hard to use, or otherwise prefer to read in plaintext, a plaintext version is at https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/pharmacy/mark-cuban-s-pharmacy-started-with-a-cold-email.html?tmpl=component&print=1&layout=default https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/pharmacy/mark-cuban-s-...
- notRobot 5y ago
  Really cool, thanks!
drinker 5y ago
Mark Cuban isn't doing anything Novel here, there were other pharmacies already doing this for years. My family has been using honeybee health for a couple years now and there's blink health and others (no affiliation with these companies)
- adora 5y ago
  Seems like the more companies like this with varying abilities of marketing to get as widespread outreach the better.
- TrueGeek 5y ago
  These companies are not the same and are not offering drugs at cost. I searched for a drug that I’m paying a ton for (even with insurance). Honeybee doesn’t have it, Blink quoted me $1,200. With insurance it’s $600, GoodRx let’s me get it for $200.
  - lmm 5y ago
    At those prices I doubt that's a generic, which means Mark Cuban won't have it either.
    - TrueGeek 5y ago
      Sadly, no, it is a generic. https://imgur.com/a/JmRwtCT https://imgur.com/a/JmRwtCT
- xeromal 5y ago
  What's the point of this comment?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
eganist 5y ago
Likely orthogonal, but it wouldn't surprise me if Brian Cuban's story and battles against substance abuse served as an additional motivator. Brian's pretty public about it. Wrote a whole (and great) book, "The Addicted Lawyer," telling his story in depth. Granted there's nothing Big Pharma in there from what I remember, but I could see me being motivated in a similar direction if a sibling had to fight that fight.
tedmcory77 5y ago
“ People always ask, well why didn't somebody do this before? The reality is there's so much money there, it's hard not to be greedy," Mr. Cuban said on the podcast. "If you get to any scale at all, those PBMs will start throwing money at you and saying, 'Look, just play the game.'" - Isnt this price fixing? AKA an illegal activity in the States?
moralestapia 5y ago
"I could make a fortune from this," Mr. Cuban told Texas Monthly last fall. "But I won't. I've got enough money. I'd rather f— up the drug industry in every way possible." Truly hope that's an honest statement, wish them the best if that's the case.
- dopylitty 5y ago
  Even if it’s an honest statement, what happens when Cuban dies or otherwise no longer controls the business? Inevitably someone will take control and raise prices to match the rest of the industry. The root problem is having for profit companies involved in providing critical medical treatments. The solution is for people to band together and create an entity (the government) to provide these treatments at cost without the incredible inefficiency of for profit business.
  - JamisonM 5y ago
    > Inevitably someone will take control and raise prices to match the rest of the industry I don't know that this level of fatalism is appropriate, and if it sets the new level for the rest of the industry at a lower rate that would be good! A co-op can do what you are describing, seems like someone should send Mr. Cuban a cold email asking him to re-incorporate his venture as a co-op!
  - dahdum 5y ago
    That’s why they formed as a public benefit corporation, it makes it more difficult to pivot towards pure profit seeking.
    - lmm 5y ago
      Does it? I remember when Etsy was making a big fuss about being a public benefit corporation and then a couple of years later they just quietly dropped it.
      - moralestapia 5y ago
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
On one hand, we should obviously applaud anyone doing anything to bring down drug prices. On the other hand, I'm increasingly uncomfortable with just how much free marketing and PR is being applied to the "Mark Cuban Pharmacy" without much critical examination of what's going on here. Taking one of the examples straight from their homepage: They will sell you 30 Prozac tablets for $3.90: https://costplusdrugs.com/medications/fluoxetine-10mg-capsule/ https://costplusdrugs.com/medications/fluoxetine-10mg-capsul... They list the "Retail price at other pharmacies" as $22.80 and claim to save you $18.90. Fantastic, right? Except nobody should actually be paying $22.80 for generic Prozac. You can drive to any local Walmart and get it for $4 and they will bill your insurance, which will count toward your deductible. (Walmart has a list of their $4 and other cheap prescriptions here: https://www.walmart.com/cp/4-prescriptions/1078664 https://www.walmart.com/cp/4-prescriptions/1078664 ) Mark Cuban's pharmacy, however, refuses to deal with your insurance and they're going to charge an extra $5.00 shipping at checkout. So now you're paying basically twice as much to Mark Cuban's pharmacy even though they're telling you the entire way that you're actually saving money. I also checked my personal insurance and my negotiated rate for the same medication is also less than $5 at local pharmacies. Now of course it's likely that other drugs will work out to be cheaper on Mark Cuban's pharmacy than any other combination of your personal insurance and local pharmacies, but that's far from guaranteed. I'm concerned that Mark Cuban is capitalizing on people's lack of understanding about how insurance works and how easy it can be to look up drug prices (use your insurance company's website or just pick up the phone and call your pharmacy, they'll check for you). His profit margins, however small, rely on people skipping their insurance and going straight to Mark Cuban's pharmacy. That could be fine in some circumstance, but in others, perhaps many other cases, the customer would come out behind by opting out of their insurance. I wish some media outlets would actually dig into this instead of endlessly recycling the company's own talking points verbatim.
- jtchang 5y ago
  The point is that I have to drive to a local walmart and deal with insurance. That sounds harder.
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
refurb 5y ago
You can see the prices on the website: https://costplusdrugs.com/medications/ https://costplusdrugs.com/medications/ A quick search of 2-3 drugs shows it comparable to Goodrx. And with Goodrx I can go to my local pharmacy and get it today.
- 1123581321 5y ago
  This is an actual pharmacy. Goodrx is wonderful, but it's basically an exploit of the existing pharmacy+PBM system and pharmacies would love to cut it off. Real pharmacies with cheap and transparent pricing are going to be better for patients in the long run.
jimt1234 5y ago
I worked for a PBM back in the 90s. The company, and the whole industry, was/is shady AF. I remember once when I was volun-told to work for new program that handled "rebates". They needed a nerd to support the servers/databases. There was a presentation explaining the program and how it worked. At the conclusion, I asked, "So, this is a kick-back?", and the room went silent. "No, it's not a kick-back. It's a rebate." Hmmm. "Well, it sounds like a kick-back. What's the difference?" We went back-and-forth for a minute or two. Then, finally, some suit spoke up and said "Kick-backs are illegal. Rebates are not." And that was that. So, I applaud Mark Cuban for his efforts here. I hope this succeeds.
- refurb 5y ago
  If I got my grocery store and they say “buy 5 bottles of shampoo and mail your receipt for a $5 rebate” am I getting a “kick back”? PBM rebates are not illegal. They aren’t transparent to patients (which is a problem) but they aren’t illegal.
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    If the end customer gets the money then it's not a kickback. If a middleman gets the money it's probably a kickback.
    - refurb 5y ago
      That’s not how kickbacks work. A doctor could easily tell a patient “if you go to this hospital for surgery, I’ll give you $100” That’s still a kickback.
      - Dylan16807 5y ago
        Is the doctor doing that for fun? If the doctor is getting any of the money, then that part is the kickback. If the doctor really gets nothing extra, and the hospital gets nothing extra, then that's not a kickback, it's just weird.
jesprenj 5y ago
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hampelm 5y ago
Mark Cuban's program is amazing and revolutionary. I'd love to see more transparency about the manufacturers involved. Katherine Eban's 2019 book Bottle of Lies showed that many major non-US generic drug manufacturers are not subject to rigorous testing or inspection, and several conspired to produce ineffective or dangerous medications. I also learned from that book that generic drugs are not produced by the same process as the brand-name drugs. I thought it was basically an open-sourcing of the drug and it's not that at all. They use the same ingredients, but the generic manufacturers need to reverse-engineer the proprietary manufacturing processes of the big brands, because important details are often deliberately omitted from the patents.
jsnk 5y ago
This is just a rant. I want Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple, Walmart, all the so called evil multinational corps, billionaires like Cuban, Gates, Musk, Zuckerberg & Co. and the the government to get into American healthcare industry and dismantle the multi trillion dollars racket, change it into something functional and useful for the people. I don't care if it will mean millions of people in the insurance, hospital administration, public and private health policies will be out of jobs. Sorry I don't. Also for doctors, medical schools, state medical license issuing bodies, you are gonna allow minimum 10x increase in new doctors entering your field. The gravy train must stop. The system must work for the people, not at the expense of the people. Should it be socialized healthcare or free market healthcare? At this point, I don't care. Anything else is better than this heap of trash. I've experienced both systems in my life and both systems are superior to the American system. But these discussion are distractions to what's really causing the problem in the American health care system. There are trillion dollar protected class of people who make the entire system unworkable. This system needs to collapse and be replaced with something new.
- techsupporter 5y ago
  > I don't care if it will mean millions of people in the insurance, hospital administration, public and private health policies will be out of jobs. Sorry I don't. As someone who works in this industry, though for a non-profit medical practice group, we want it gone as much as the patients. It's an absolute nightmare to do anything. We have a staff of twenty people just to deal with the paperwork side of the business, and that doesn't include answering phone calls from patients. All of those people could be put to far more productive use doing anything else; half of them are people who wanted to get into medicine but not through a full-fledged medical degree and are now toiling away shuffling forms. We would love to move them to patient care assistants or anything else but we have to have them in order to get paid. (I know for sure we would like to have them do other things and they would like to do this because our group has a role rotation program where people can rotate in and out of groups to try other things. The insurance/paperwork group has virtually no one want to rotate in and almost the entire group is on the list to rotate out for a month or two a year to do something different.) > Also for doctors, medical schools, state medical license issuing bodies, you are gonna allow minimum 10x increase in new doctors entering your field. I also completely agree with this. It's frustrating to deal with the regulatory issues, too. We had to move a practice office (that is, where patient care is provided) from a place we leased to an office we bought as part of a commercial condominium a few years ago. Getting that approved took months of back and forth because the rules of the licensing body didn't fully contemplate an "office condominium" like we purchased.
ALittleLight 5y ago
Either I don't understand the phrase "Vertical integration" or Mark Cuban doesn't. Cuban says "We basically created a vertically integrated manufacturing company." But, they don't do manufacturing, because later Cuban says "The manufacturers love what we're doing for that reason". They also apparently don't do the pharmacy aspect because Cuban says his company "charges a $3 pharmacy fee to pay the pharmacists it works with". It sounds to me like this is less of a vertically integrated drug manufacturer and more of a website to resell generics at a 15% markup plus pharmacy fee plus shipping and handling. Looking at his website I see a "powered by truepill" logo at the bottom. Truepill seems to be a company that does online pharmacies... So, Cuban Cost Plus is, possibly, a digital storefront for truepill?
- mgerdts 5y ago
  it seems manufacturing is on the todo list. https://khn.org/morning-breakout/mark-cuban-unveils-plan-to-build-dallas-factory-for-new-drug-company/ https://khn.org/morning-breakout/mark-cuban-unveils-plan-to-...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  They plan to both manufacture and resell. >15% markup plus pharmacy fee plus shipping and handling. This is the intent, and still cuts out at least 2 middle men between consumers and manufacturers: the insurance company and pharmacy benefit managers.
  - alphabettsy 5y ago
    There were already many companies doing this.
    - lelandfe 5y ago
      Yeah. It seems the difference here is (supposedly) this sentiment: > "People always ask, well why didn't somebody do this before? The reality is there's so much money there, it's hard not to be greedy," Mr. Cuban said > "But I won't. I've got enough money. I'd rather f— up the drug industry in every way possible."
glaucon 5y ago
I'm not from the USA ... could someone explain what a "Pharmacy Benefits Manager" does and who they work for ?
AlphaSquared 5y ago
The prices for these drugs is ridiculous. My kids vere prescribed Ventolin this winter due smog related illnesses. Looking at price of a Ventolin inhaler (90mcg) even on Cuban's website (https://costplusdrugs.com/medications/albuterol-90mcg-inhaler18g/ https://costplusdrugs.com/medications/albuterol-90mcg-inhale...) it costs $43 The same thing costs less than $2 in Pakistan for the Glaxo Smith Kline version. https://www.emeds.pk/ventolin https://www.emeds.pk/ventolin
- enjoyyourlife 5y ago
  Are you going to go to Pakistan to buy it?
  - AlphaSquared 5y ago
    I live in Pakistan :)
    - enjoyyourlife 5y ago
      Good for you. Drugs in the US are often much more expensive than the prices on the website
  - renewiltord 5y ago
    Haha no. I get them muled over from India with a prescription or I’d go get them myself. Only suckers and rich people pay American rates. I have so many antibiotics and controlled substances you’d be better off raiding me over your local Walgreens in a zombie apocalypse. Seriously, sometimes I read about people dying of lack of access to insulin and it blows my mind. It’s one payday loan spent on the round trip flight and 30 hrs and you have cheap medication. Even when folks here were whining that HCQ was going to be in “a shortage”, I just bought some Plaquenil from there. Folks really like building cages and then just die in them. Frankly confusing but hey it’s your life.
    - kylehotchkiss 5y ago
      https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/5-tips-traveling-us-medications https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/5-tips-travel... The government's attitude appears to be against muling medicines over (I realize that people still do it all the time). Self-prescribing antibiotics is not great for antibiotic resistance - Al Jazeera has done some great reporting on how Indian pharmacies loose prescription checks or doctors overambitious antibiotic prescriptions have caused a rise in antibiotic resistant superbugs (https://www.aljazeera.com/program/101-east/2016/8/9/the-rise-of-indias-superbugs https://www.aljazeera.com/program/101-east/2016/8/9/the-rise...) - sure they're easy to get, but there's been a tremendous health cost in India because of that But not only "suckers and rich people" pay American rates - the people who were born here without foreign ties do it all the time! And finally, India just recently opened for tourism, plus they're not doing visa on arrivals yet, how can people get a payday loan, passport, visa via embassy, and a whole trip in so casually? Edit: can't you just do everything you mentioned above in Mexico anyways?
tylermenezes 5y ago
I recall meeting Oshmyansky when he was pitching Osh's Affordable Pharmaceuticals (I think at a YC interview day). He really has a thing for sketchy sounding names :) but I really admire how driven he is to solve this problem.
- xeromal 5y ago
  Haha, you can't be great at everything.
chevman 5y ago
There have been plenty of companies that have followed this pattern - GoodRx, SingleCare, ScriptRelief, etc. As others have pointed out, Cuban is basically running a lead gen operation that then services customers drug needs via a white labeled site/fulfillment operation run by TruePill. Any idea who is funding TruePill? One of the largest PBMs in the industry - https://www.optumventures.com/portfolio/ https://www.optumventures.com/portfolio/ Many ways to make money in pharma!
ck2 5y ago
Adding it to the list, someone is going to have to make a meta search engine for online RX So far we have goodrx, singlecare, etc. amazon.com/primerx walmart.com/pharmacy (walmart.com/cp/pharmacy-mail-order/1042239) geniusrx.com ro.co/pharmacy costplusdrugs.com/medications Another aspect is buying a year's worth at a time if it's a daily medication.
YaBomm 5y ago
waynesonfire 5y ago
Why is marks new business venture bring advertised here?

202 points by betocmn 5y ago

If you’re on mobile, where the site is a little hard to use, or otherwise prefer to read in plaintext, a plaintext version is at https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/pharmacy/mark-cuban-s-pharmacy-started-with-a-cold-email.html?tmpl=component&print=1&layout=default https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/pharmacy/mark-cuban-s-...

notRobot 5y ago
Really cool, thanks!

drinker 5y ago

Mark Cuban isn't doing anything Novel here, there were other pharmacies already doing this for years. My family has been using honeybee health for a couple years now and there's blink health and others (no affiliation with these companies)

adora 5y ago
Seems like the more companies like this with varying abilities of marketing to get as widespread outreach the better.
TrueGeek 5y ago
These companies are not the same and are not offering drugs at cost. I searched for a drug that I’m paying a ton for (even with insurance). Honeybee doesn’t have it, Blink quoted me $1,200. With insurance it’s $600, GoodRx let’s me get it for $200.
- lmm 5y ago
  At those prices I doubt that's a generic, which means Mark Cuban won't have it either.
  - TrueGeek 5y ago
    Sadly, no, it is a generic. https://imgur.com/a/JmRwtCT https://imgur.com/a/JmRwtCT
xeromal 5y ago
What's the point of this comment?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

eganist 5y ago

Likely orthogonal, but it wouldn't surprise me if Brian Cuban's story and battles against substance abuse served as an additional motivator. Brian's pretty public about it. Wrote a whole (and great) book, "The Addicted Lawyer," telling his story in depth. Granted there's nothing Big Pharma in there from what I remember, but I could see me being motivated in a similar direction if a sibling had to fight that fight.

tedmcory77 5y ago

“ People always ask, well why didn't somebody do this before? The reality is there's so much money there, it's hard not to be greedy," Mr. Cuban said on the podcast. "If you get to any scale at all, those PBMs will start throwing money at you and saying, 'Look, just play the game.'" - Isnt this price fixing? AKA an illegal activity in the States?

moralestapia 5y ago

"I could make a fortune from this," Mr. Cuban told Texas Monthly last fall. "But I won't. I've got enough money. I'd rather f— up the drug industry in every way possible." Truly hope that's an honest statement, wish them the best if that's the case.

dopylitty 5y ago
Even if it’s an honest statement, what happens when Cuban dies or otherwise no longer controls the business? Inevitably someone will take control and raise prices to match the rest of the industry. The root problem is having for profit companies involved in providing critical medical treatments. The solution is for people to band together and create an entity (the government) to provide these treatments at cost without the incredible inefficiency of for profit business.
- JamisonM 5y ago
  > Inevitably someone will take control and raise prices to match the rest of the industry I don't know that this level of fatalism is appropriate, and if it sets the new level for the rest of the industry at a lower rate that would be good! A co-op can do what you are describing, seems like someone should send Mr. Cuban a cold email asking him to re-incorporate his venture as a co-op!
- dahdum 5y ago
  That’s why they formed as a public benefit corporation, it makes it more difficult to pivot towards pure profit seeking.
  - lmm 5y ago
    Does it? I remember when Etsy was making a big fuss about being a public benefit corporation and then a couple of years later they just quietly dropped it.
    - moralestapia 5y ago

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

On one hand, we should obviously applaud anyone doing anything to bring down drug prices. On the other hand, I'm increasingly uncomfortable with just how much free marketing and PR is being applied to the "Mark Cuban Pharmacy" without much critical examination of what's going on here. Taking one of the examples straight from their homepage: They will sell you 30 Prozac tablets for $3.90: https://costplusdrugs.com/medications/fluoxetine-10mg-capsule/ https://costplusdrugs.com/medications/fluoxetine-10mg-capsul... They list the "Retail price at other pharmacies" as $22.80 and claim to save you $18.90. Fantastic, right? Except nobody should actually be paying $22.80 for generic Prozac. You can drive to any local Walmart and get it for $4 and they will bill your insurance, which will count toward your deductible. (Walmart has a list of their $4 and other cheap prescriptions here: https://www.walmart.com/cp/4-prescriptions/1078664 https://www.walmart.com/cp/4-prescriptions/1078664 ) Mark Cuban's pharmacy, however, refuses to deal with your insurance and they're going to charge an extra $5.00 shipping at checkout. So now you're paying basically twice as much to Mark Cuban's pharmacy even though they're telling you the entire way that you're actually saving money. I also checked my personal insurance and my negotiated rate for the same medication is also less than $5 at local pharmacies. Now of course it's likely that other drugs will work out to be cheaper on Mark Cuban's pharmacy than any other combination of your personal insurance and local pharmacies, but that's far from guaranteed. I'm concerned that Mark Cuban is capitalizing on people's lack of understanding about how insurance works and how easy it can be to look up drug prices (use your insurance company's website or just pick up the phone and call your pharmacy, they'll check for you). His profit margins, however small, rely on people skipping their insurance and going straight to Mark Cuban's pharmacy. That could be fine in some circumstance, but in others, perhaps many other cases, the customer would come out behind by opting out of their insurance. I wish some media outlets would actually dig into this instead of endlessly recycling the company's own talking points verbatim.

jtchang 5y ago
The point is that I have to drive to a local walmart and deal with insurance. That sounds harder.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago

refurb 5y ago

You can see the prices on the website: https://costplusdrugs.com/medications/ https://costplusdrugs.com/medications/ A quick search of 2-3 drugs shows it comparable to Goodrx. And with Goodrx I can go to my local pharmacy and get it today.

1123581321 5y ago
This is an actual pharmacy. Goodrx is wonderful, but it's basically an exploit of the existing pharmacy+PBM system and pharmacies would love to cut it off. Real pharmacies with cheap and transparent pricing are going to be better for patients in the long run.

jimt1234 5y ago

I worked for a PBM back in the 90s. The company, and the whole industry, was/is shady AF. I remember once when I was volun-told to work for new program that handled "rebates". They needed a nerd to support the servers/databases. There was a presentation explaining the program and how it worked. At the conclusion, I asked, "So, this is a kick-back?", and the room went silent. "No, it's not a kick-back. It's a rebate." Hmmm. "Well, it sounds like a kick-back. What's the difference?" We went back-and-forth for a minute or two. Then, finally, some suit spoke up and said "Kick-backs are illegal. Rebates are not." And that was that. So, I applaud Mark Cuban for his efforts here. I hope this succeeds.

refurb 5y ago
If I got my grocery store and they say “buy 5 bottles of shampoo and mail your receipt for a $5 rebate” am I getting a “kick back”? PBM rebates are not illegal. They aren’t transparent to patients (which is a problem) but they aren’t illegal.
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  If the end customer gets the money then it's not a kickback. If a middleman gets the money it's probably a kickback.
  - refurb 5y ago
    That’s not how kickbacks work. A doctor could easily tell a patient “if you go to this hospital for surgery, I’ll give you $100” That’s still a kickback.
    - Dylan16807 5y ago
      Is the doctor doing that for fun? If the doctor is getting any of the money, then that part is the kickback. If the doctor really gets nothing extra, and the hospital gets nothing extra, then that's not a kickback, it's just weird.

jesprenj 5y ago

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hampelm 5y ago

Mark Cuban's program is amazing and revolutionary. I'd love to see more transparency about the manufacturers involved. Katherine Eban's 2019 book Bottle of Lies showed that many major non-US generic drug manufacturers are not subject to rigorous testing or inspection, and several conspired to produce ineffective or dangerous medications. I also learned from that book that generic drugs are not produced by the same process as the brand-name drugs. I thought it was basically an open-sourcing of the drug and it's not that at all. They use the same ingredients, but the generic manufacturers need to reverse-engineer the proprietary manufacturing processes of the big brands, because important details are often deliberately omitted from the patents.

jsnk 5y ago

This is just a rant. I want Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple, Walmart, all the so called evil multinational corps, billionaires like Cuban, Gates, Musk, Zuckerberg & Co. and the the government to get into American healthcare industry and dismantle the multi trillion dollars racket, change it into something functional and useful for the people. I don't care if it will mean millions of people in the insurance, hospital administration, public and private health policies will be out of jobs. Sorry I don't. Also for doctors, medical schools, state medical license issuing bodies, you are gonna allow minimum 10x increase in new doctors entering your field. The gravy train must stop. The system must work for the people, not at the expense of the people. Should it be socialized healthcare or free market healthcare? At this point, I don't care. Anything else is better than this heap of trash. I've experienced both systems in my life and both systems are superior to the American system. But these discussion are distractions to what's really causing the problem in the American health care system. There are trillion dollar protected class of people who make the entire system unworkable. This system needs to collapse and be replaced with something new.

techsupporter 5y ago
> I don't care if it will mean millions of people in the insurance, hospital administration, public and private health policies will be out of jobs. Sorry I don't. As someone who works in this industry, though for a non-profit medical practice group, we want it gone as much as the patients. It's an absolute nightmare to do anything. We have a staff of twenty people just to deal with the paperwork side of the business, and that doesn't include answering phone calls from patients. All of those people could be put to far more productive use doing anything else; half of them are people who wanted to get into medicine but not through a full-fledged medical degree and are now toiling away shuffling forms. We would love to move them to patient care assistants or anything else but we have to have them in order to get paid. (I know for sure we would like to have them do other things and they would like to do this because our group has a role rotation program where people can rotate in and out of groups to try other things. The insurance/paperwork group has virtually no one want to rotate in and almost the entire group is on the list to rotate out for a month or two a year to do something different.) > Also for doctors, medical schools, state medical license issuing bodies, you are gonna allow minimum 10x increase in new doctors entering your field. I also completely agree with this. It's frustrating to deal with the regulatory issues, too. We had to move a practice office (that is, where patient care is provided) from a place we leased to an office we bought as part of a commercial condominium a few years ago. Getting that approved took months of back and forth because the rules of the licensing body didn't fully contemplate an "office condominium" like we purchased.

ALittleLight 5y ago

Either I don't understand the phrase "Vertical integration" or Mark Cuban doesn't. Cuban says "We basically created a vertically integrated manufacturing company." But, they don't do manufacturing, because later Cuban says "The manufacturers love what we're doing for that reason". They also apparently don't do the pharmacy aspect because Cuban says his company "charges a $3 pharmacy fee to pay the pharmacists it works with". It sounds to me like this is less of a vertically integrated drug manufacturer and more of a website to resell generics at a 15% markup plus pharmacy fee plus shipping and handling. Looking at his website I see a "powered by truepill" logo at the bottom. Truepill seems to be a company that does online pharmacies... So, Cuban Cost Plus is, possibly, a digital storefront for truepill?

mgerdts 5y ago
it seems manufacturing is on the todo list. https://khn.org/morning-breakout/mark-cuban-unveils-plan-to-build-dallas-factory-for-new-drug-company/ https://khn.org/morning-breakout/mark-cuban-unveils-plan-to-...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
s1artibartfast 5y ago
They plan to both manufacture and resell. >15% markup plus pharmacy fee plus shipping and handling. This is the intent, and still cuts out at least 2 middle men between consumers and manufacturers: the insurance company and pharmacy benefit managers.
- alphabettsy 5y ago
  There were already many companies doing this.
  - lelandfe 5y ago
    Yeah. It seems the difference here is (supposedly) this sentiment: > "People always ask, well why didn't somebody do this before? The reality is there's so much money there, it's hard not to be greedy," Mr. Cuban said > "But I won't. I've got enough money. I'd rather f— up the drug industry in every way possible."

glaucon 5y ago

I'm not from the USA ... could someone explain what a "Pharmacy Benefits Manager" does and who they work for ?

AlphaSquared 5y ago

The prices for these drugs is ridiculous. My kids vere prescribed Ventolin this winter due smog related illnesses. Looking at price of a Ventolin inhaler (90mcg) even on Cuban's website (https://costplusdrugs.com/medications/albuterol-90mcg-inhaler18g/ https://costplusdrugs.com/medications/albuterol-90mcg-inhale...) it costs $43 The same thing costs less than $2 in Pakistan for the Glaxo Smith Kline version. https://www.emeds.pk/ventolin https://www.emeds.pk/ventolin

enjoyyourlife 5y ago
Are you going to go to Pakistan to buy it?
- AlphaSquared 5y ago
  I live in Pakistan :)
  - enjoyyourlife 5y ago
    Good for you. Drugs in the US are often much more expensive than the prices on the website
- renewiltord 5y ago
  Haha no. I get them muled over from India with a prescription or I’d go get them myself. Only suckers and rich people pay American rates. I have so many antibiotics and controlled substances you’d be better off raiding me over your local Walgreens in a zombie apocalypse. Seriously, sometimes I read about people dying of lack of access to insulin and it blows my mind. It’s one payday loan spent on the round trip flight and 30 hrs and you have cheap medication. Even when folks here were whining that HCQ was going to be in “a shortage”, I just bought some Plaquenil from there. Folks really like building cages and then just die in them. Frankly confusing but hey it’s your life.
  - kylehotchkiss 5y ago
    https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/5-tips-traveling-us-medications https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/5-tips-travel... The government's attitude appears to be against muling medicines over (I realize that people still do it all the time). Self-prescribing antibiotics is not great for antibiotic resistance - Al Jazeera has done some great reporting on how Indian pharmacies loose prescription checks or doctors overambitious antibiotic prescriptions have caused a rise in antibiotic resistant superbugs (https://www.aljazeera.com/program/101-east/2016/8/9/the-rise-of-indias-superbugs https://www.aljazeera.com/program/101-east/2016/8/9/the-rise...) - sure they're easy to get, but there's been a tremendous health cost in India because of that But not only "suckers and rich people" pay American rates - the people who were born here without foreign ties do it all the time! And finally, India just recently opened for tourism, plus they're not doing visa on arrivals yet, how can people get a payday loan, passport, visa via embassy, and a whole trip in so casually? Edit: can't you just do everything you mentioned above in Mexico anyways?

tylermenezes 5y ago

I recall meeting Oshmyansky when he was pitching Osh's Affordable Pharmaceuticals (I think at a YC interview day). He really has a thing for sketchy sounding names :) but I really admire how driven he is to solve this problem.

xeromal 5y ago
Haha, you can't be great at everything.

chevman 5y ago

There have been plenty of companies that have followed this pattern - GoodRx, SingleCare, ScriptRelief, etc. As others have pointed out, Cuban is basically running a lead gen operation that then services customers drug needs via a white labeled site/fulfillment operation run by TruePill. Any idea who is funding TruePill? One of the largest PBMs in the industry - https://www.optumventures.com/portfolio/ https://www.optumventures.com/portfolio/ Many ways to make money in pharma!

ck2 5y ago

Adding it to the list, someone is going to have to make a meta search engine for online RX So far we have goodrx, singlecare, etc. amazon.com/primerx walmart.com/pharmacy (walmart.com/cp/pharmacy-mail-order/1042239) geniusrx.com ro.co/pharmacy costplusdrugs.com/medications Another aspect is buying a year's worth at a time if it's a daily medication.

YaBomm 5y ago

waynesonfire 5y ago

Why is marks new business venture bring advertised here?