Reinventing Pharmacy: Mark Cuban Says Trust Is Missing Across Healthcare. Here’s What He’s Doing About It

Mark Cuban built a career disrupting industries and creating new
ones. Now, his sights are set on healthcare.

There’s no secret ingredient to Mark’s success. As the world sees
very publicly on Shark Tank, his style is the opposite of keeping
secrets. It’s based on providing respectful, but direct, honest
and unvarnished opinions. He’s bringing that style to healthcare
in order to inject what he says the industry is lacking most.
Trust.

To kick-off a series of Healthcare is Hard podcast episodes that
will dive deep into all aspects of reinventing the pharmacy
space, Keith Figlioli sat down with Mark to discuss his vision
and strategy behind Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company, and many
other healthcare-related topics.

With Cost Plus Drug Company, Mark is bringing radical
transparency to what he says is the most opaque industry he’s
ever been involved in. He’s doing it by pricing every single
product the same way – the cost of a drug, plus 15% markup, plus
pharmacy fee (if any), plus shipping – and publishing these
details for everyone to see.

Through this model, Mark aims reduce costs and improve access to
drugs, while rebuilding trust in the industry. With 2,400+ drugs
now available, he’s off to a fast start and talked to Keith about
other evolving elements of the business including wholesale
operations for providers, partnerships with grocery and pharmacy
chains, and more.

Some of the other topics Keith and Mark discussed include:



The Netflix model for specialty drugs. With
revolutionary precision medicine coming to market at high costs
that can reach millions of dollars per treatment, how will
employers and consumers afford them? According to Mark, that’s
the wrong question. He’s looking at the challenge through the
manufacturer’s lens, asking how much they’ve invested in drug
development and at what dollar value can they make reasonable
returns. He discussed conversations he’s having with
manufacturers about creating subscription services that could
cover a wide range of high-cost, specialty drugs.


Transparent, direct contracting. Mark now self-insures
his employees and their family members, contracts directly with
providers on payment rates, and – following the Cost Plus
philosophy – publishes everything for the world to see. He
shared a personal story that helped lead him to this decision
where he paid a provider directly when his son needed an X-ray
and realized it was a fraction of the cost of agreed upon rates
with his insurance company. He talked about how this decision
cuts other costs while improving employee wellness, removing
burdens on HR, and ultimately helping providers by removing the
risk they take and helping them get paid faster. 


Millions of AI models. Mark is a big believer that there
will be millions of AI models and everyone will have one. He
says 100 years from now you’ll be able to ask him questions
through a model trained on all his emails and data. But AI in
healthcare will be more segmented. He talks about how there’s
no way leading research hospitals with respected brands will
feed their data into one large language model unless they get
paid an extreme amount of money. They may even stop publishing
“anything and everything” to prevent their research from being
ingested into someone else’s model.



To hear Mark and Keith discuss these topics and more, listen to
this episode of Healthcare is Hard: A Podcast for Insiders.