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According to yesterday's edition of the Morning Brew:

Shark Tank, basketball, and generic drugs: a great sick day plan and also the three things Mark Cuban is now known for. The billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks has launched an online pharmacy for generic drugs that looks to cut out middlemen and combat pharmaceutical industry price gouging by offering steep discounts.

The Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company set up CostPlusDrugs.com last week with 100 generic drugs to treat conditions like diabetes and asthma. Cost Plus will not accept health insurance but claims its prices will still be lower than what people would typically pay at a pharmacy. “All drugs are priced at cost plus 15%!” Cuban tweeted Thursday.

One example: A month’s supply of Imatinib, a drug used to treat leukemia, retails for around $9,600, and $120 per month with a voucher. Cost Plus’s price: $47 a month.
The company is building an $11 million drug manufacturing plant in the Dallas area that it hopes to complete by April. Cuban tweeted that the plant will allow the company to expand into injectables.

Zoom out: A September Gallup poll found that 18 million Americans were not able to afford at least one prescribed medication in the previous three months.—MK

Curious what people think of this development. For those who don't know, Mark Cuban is a billionaire who is best-known as one of the 'sharks' on Shark Tank, rich people who choose whether to invest in contestants' businesses (the concept is called Dragons' Den in most other countries). It's a great development, but sometimes I can't but feel like the first step to making any sort of positive change in America is to become a billionaire. People shouldn't only have access to affordable drugs because Mark Cuban found it in his heart to make it happen, just like America shouldn't only be continuing a manned space program just because that's what Elon Musk wants to do. But that seems to be where we are. =/

I work in pharmacy so...I will tell you what I see. I'm going to use insulin I don't know if Cubans company will be involved in insulin but I've seen insurance companies that paid for insulin last year suddenly stop covering insulin this year. January is the worst time to work in pharmacy,  people who are deciding between paying 350$ for a drug they need or just not taking it at all. Options exist like GoodRX or the Walgreens Perscription Savings Club which is ostensibly just GoodRX but for Walgreens only and you have to pay for it (generally the prices are better though than GRX) i digress. The thing with GRX is that their prices are entirely decided by contracts signed with pharmacies that's why prices vary from pharmacy to pharmacy and can change during the year.

So all of this is to say... Healthcare is ass in this country. And this isn't going to fix it. But if Cuban's company charges a flat 15% for every drug it manufactured than that's a good deal and that company will have a place because that insulin I'm talking about that's 350$ is 150$ on GRX but Cuban's company will theoretically charge 52$ and when you have to choose by price for a drug that you need or death 52$ is actually a good deal in the fucked up system currently in use in the USA

I know it's not going to fix it, but it's something...and what bothers me is that it's such a simple thing that anybody with some money could have done at any point in the last 20 years. It's just that nobody ever wanted to...everyone that could wanted to pump as much money out of sick people as they could for their own profit. Mark Cuban told Forbes that he put his name on the company because he wanted to show that capitalism can be compassionate...but it seems like a minority view among those who actually could show that.

If it takes a billionaire with the will to execute such a simple solution to a problem...perhaps the simplest of the problems plaguing healthcare...what does that say for the more complicated problems?

Another article in the Morning Brew happened to come up about this company:

Medicare could have saved $3.6 billion in a single year if it bought its drugs from Mark Cuban’s newly launched pharmacy, a new study from Harvard Medical School researchers concluded.

The paper, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine on Monday, said that Medicare’s drug program (Part D) is overpaying for generic drugs by being forced to navigate a complex web of pharmacies and private health insurers instead of buying them straight from the source, like Cuban’s firm does. The government isn’t allowed to do that, though.

So what does Cuban’s company do? Named Cost Plus Drug Company, the billionaire’s online pharmacy buys generic drugs directly from manufacturers and sells them after adding a 15% markup, $3 fee for labor, and $5 fee for shipping. It has more than 400,000 account holders and offers more than 300 generics, according to the WSJ.

That model, when compared to the Medicare maze, resulted in some stunning price discrepancies, the researchers found. While Medicare paid $160 for a 90-day supply of acid-reflux treatment esomeprazole, it could have gotten it for $17 from Cuban’s pharmacy.

Bottom line: “There are some serious inefficiencies in the pharmaceutical supply chain,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Hussain Lalani.—NF

Some "serious inefficiencies" lol. Everything was working as intended.

I mean, Pfizer spun off their generics branch, Viatris (VTRS) a while back.  I think it's definitely got potential.  As much as Cuban claims he's an innovator, the reality is that the prescription drug supply chains are notoriously complex and there's really not too much to be made on a drug once it enters the public domain after 20 years or so.  Like Viatris' margins aren't even 15% I don't believe. 

That being said, let this also be my rant that we as consumers can't purchase antibiotics in the US.  This sucks to such an insane degree and increases costs ridiculously because the AMA lobbies for it and such.  Chicken farmers can pump antibiotics everywhere, and the rest of the world can buy many over the counter, but we have to go in to a doctor for something as trivially diagnosable as strep throat or pink eye for kids.  Then the doctor charges $300 to insurance, and you're stuck with a copay, etc etc. 

Insurance in healthcare has just gotten so bad that it's farcical.  The combined lobbying might of the AMA, medical centers, pharma and health insurance has created INSANE expenses and inefficiency. 

Especially AMA refusing to increase the number of doctors trained to constrain supply and physician wages, for example.  That's sick.