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Mark Cuban's pharmacy started with a cold email

beckershospitalreview.com

171–180 of 221 posts

Re: Mark Cuban's pharmacy started with a cold email

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When has the US had a Capitalist market for healthcare? The US has a particularly horrible hyper regulated, government shielded, cartel-based healthcare system and has for decades - the time during which its healthcare costs have skyrocketed out of control. The US could hardly be further away from Capitalism in how its healthcare system is structured.

If you really think dropping regulations and making it a free for all for multi-billion dollar corporations to fiddle with our health would improve anything, you're simply lying lol Countries with more regulation and more control by the state have... prices that are a fraction of the US. Surprise. Just like countries with stricter environmental restrictions have fewer clear-cut forests, less polluted water, etc. Unbr…

The US has a ton of regulations that other countries don't. It tries to regulate interactions between all kinds of private companies that don't even exist in other markets. It has tougher standards restricting the supply of health care workers, preventing new hospitals from competing on price, and preventing new generics from entering the market. Also a vast amount of regulation around coupling health insurance to employers.

Most of these regulations don't exist in countries because there are top down price negotiations and/or universal healthcare.

The US regulation is the worst of both worlds.

Re: Mark Cuban's pharmacy started with a cold email

#172
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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) That certainly hasn't been my experience. Most pharmacies I've tried this with need to actually 'fill' the script and run it through insurance to get a fina…

> The sad thing is, all these pharmacies know about GoodRx and other discount providers. They could stop playing games and just run all scripts through these providers to get a 'cash price', but they don't. They aren’t allowed to contractually. The PBMs and insurance companies make pharmacies sign contracts that forbid them from doing this. They also forbid pharmacies from telling customers if it would be cheaper to…

> They also forbid pharmacies from telling customers if it would be cheaper to pay cash.

This is now illegal in the US.

https://www.aarp.org/health/drugs-supplements/info-2018/gag-...

Re: Mark Cuban's pharmacy started with a cold email

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't order corrective lenses online without a prescription. You can order frames, or reading glasses. You need a prescription for both contacts or the lenses themselves. Contacts would certainly be much cheaper without that hurdle. And I bring up vision, because it's a common problem and for less well off folk with families it can be a big expense, basically entirely unnecessarily so. Imagine making 20k/year and…

No you don't need a prescription for corrective lenses. I've ordered them without and just had to confirm there would be no returns and such

I'm pretty confident it's not possible, as I was specifically looking for this recently.

But please link me to a US site where I can legally buy contacts without providing proof of prescription, if there is one!

Re: Mark Cuban's pharmacy started with a cold email

#174
post #104

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 work…

Yup, as someone who had some experience in the industry, this screams naivety. Generic drugs are pumped out for pennies a pill by a pre-existing infrastructure across the globe. Mark will be buying from them, not spending billions trying to replicate manufacturing plants and FDA agreements. In essence it’s a cash-only pharmacy for cheap generic drugs - not that different than what Walmart and Target do with their $4/…

> Big pharma won’t give a shit because Mark can’t make his own generic versions due to IP.

Of course there's no IP protection; that's the definition of "generic." But that doesn't mean big pharma won't care. 20 years ago they might not have cared. Nowadays big pharma has learned how to game the generics industry to become sole-source generic providers and set prices as high as they wish, even without IP protection. It's this abuse of the generic marketplace that Cuban seems to be taking on.

Re: Mark Cuban's pharmacy started with a cold email

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

isn't forcing hospitals to post prices a form of regulation? In a free market (I'm interpreting this to mean laissez-faire - a market setup maximise competition and consumer choice must be regulated) nobody will post prices unless they have to or the procedures are elective, like plastic surgery is.

Yes, I'm not advocating a free market, but a competitive market. Fully free markets can lead to negative externalities like monopolies, pollution etc. What leads to good societal outcomes is competitive markets. It just happens that free and competitive overlap a lot of the time. Information hiding makes a market less competitive, but is permitted under a full free market mentality. This is an area where regulations…

I actually think requiring to give prices is consistent with libertarian approaches. I like good clear contract law. I think being able to give prices is basically required for good contracts. This is why every other industry does this, and nobody just says "we will charge you whatever we like".

If you were in another industry, and went to a judge and said "this person defaulted on their agreement to pay me whatever I want." Then I think the judge would basically tell you to get lost. And that is a good thing. The only oddness here is that somehow the medical industry has been getting away with this for a long time.

That is what the fix should be too, IMO. Basically, legislation that states unless someone expressly agrees to a price for a medical procedure, they are not liable for it.

Re: Mark Cuban's pharmacy started with a cold email

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big driver is staff salary, which are 2-3X that in Europe. Another is technology with more expensive procedures, implants, tools, ect.

So GC claimed that some US Medicare/aid prices would cause HCW to make less than minimum wage, yet now you say salaries are 2-3x higher than Europe, which generally has higher minimum wages. Somehow all these excuses are still not jiving.

Here are some easy graphs for compensation:

https://www.physiciansweekly.com/how-do-us-physician-salarie...

https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/a44d2e24-en/index.html?i...

Physicians per capita: https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/11/why-are-ameri...

Re: Mark Cuban's pharmacy started with a cold email

#177
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Countries with more regulation and more control by the state have... prices that are a fraction of the US. Funny enough, the quality and ease of access (delays for procedures etc) also "are a fraction of the US"

Nice baseless FUD that's completely wrong. :) As an American, my longest waits and worst care were all in the US. I pay just a couple bucks in Japan and get far better, far faster care. Pissing blood from a major kidney infection and hospitals politely turning me away because my insurance was out of network and "oh this is too expensive for you. Try (next hospital that rejected me)" wasn't fun. Never had an experienc…

>Not sure why Americans believe this meme, but it's very apparent that someone hasn't spent any significant time outside the country and is informed exclusively by facebook fearmongering when they say that. It's always "yeah, I know a guy who knows a guy who read an article saying the UK is worse!"

Well I guess now I know a person on hackernews with a story?

Re: Mark Cuban's pharmacy started with a cold email

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I'm not advocating a free market, but a competitive market. Fully free markets can lead to negative externalities like monopolies, pollution etc. What leads to good societal outcomes is competitive markets. It just happens that free and competitive overlap a lot of the time. Information hiding makes a market less competitive, but is permitted under a full free market mentality. This is an area where regulations…

I actually think requiring to give prices is consistent with libertarian approaches. I like good clear contract law. I think being able to give prices is basically required for good contracts. This is why every other industry does this, and nobody just says "we will charge you whatever we like". If you were in another industry, and went to a judge and said "this person defaulted on their agreement to pay me whatever…

Yup, there's a lot that can be done to foster more competition in the medical space. Important that consumers have some skin in the game too. Another big problem is that the structure of insurance plans often warp incentives such that people either under or over-consume care.

Certainly there's a good case to be made for having safety nets for those that can't afford, but for the vast majority of people, a competitive system would bring down costs substantially. The US actually pays the most for healthcare per capita than any other country, I believe. Largely goes to inefficiencies rather than health outcomes. A truly well structured and competitively designed healthcare system could greatly improve QOL for the public.

Whether it's "libertarian" or not is a matter of semantics. The free market extreme would have no regulations at all... but clearly that can lead to certain negative outcomes (monopoly being classic example). Certainly there are different flavors of libertarian... and I would consider myself one, but am in favor of regulations that encourage competition between businesses. However, not needed in most spaces, healthcare in particular seems very warped/not rationally structured.

A rule of thumb for whether a sector is competitive/efficient are whether margins are broadly high across the board. I'm definitely a capitalist and not anti-business, but in a competitive market you should expect margins to be relatively constrained in the long run. Of course first movers, and those that truly out compete the rest can attain high margins... but over time these advantages should erode as new and better players come along.

Certain SaaS is pretty interesting example, because cost of switching can be high, creating "utility-like" businesses. DocuSign, for example, is really easy to dump for a competitor, low cost of switching. But something like AWS is much more difficult... need to invest potentially millions of dollars and months of time to rewrite your systems/design learn a new cloud environment, very high and painful costs of switching. It's often cheap to choose one of many competitors, but then you're entrenched in that environment.

Anyway, long tangent, but I expect law to recognize these kind of things eventually...

Re: Mark Cuban's pharmacy started with a cold email

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big driver is staff salary, which are 2-3X that in Europe. Another is technology with more expensive procedures, implants, tools, ect.

So GC claimed that some US Medicare/aid prices would cause HCW to make less than minimum wage, yet now you say salaries are 2-3x higher than Europe, which generally has higher minimum wages. Somehow all these excuses are still not jiving.

To clarify my point, the prices causing less than minimum wage income were for those procedures only. Other procedures paid more, but often not enough. On average, Medicare pays about 80% of what an insurance company will typically pay.

Try finding a doctor while on Medicare; depending on region and specialty, only 2/5 to 2/3 doctors will take patients on Medicare.

One other thing you may have missed: salaries are for doctors working at hospitals or clinics. Doctors working at private practices typically are self employed (or co-operate as a partner) and so are much more directly impacted by low payment rates.

Edit: it is worth pointing out that the requirements to become a doctor are pretty extreme. You first need a 4 year bachelor's degree, then need to go to medical school (costing a total anywhere from 150k to 400k on the extreme high end), followed by residency (basically, a paid internship at a salary lower than a full doctor) lasting 3-7 years.

Re: Mark Cuban's pharmacy started with a cold email

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some medications are not renewed like this for good reason. Some medications require regular monitoring to ensure that bad side effects aren't happening; PrEP requires checkups every 90 days to make sure kidney function is not getting impacted.

That's fine but many don't require it for good reason, thus should be exempted. People can easily seek out prescriptions as it is today, they just need to find a doctor and say the right things. This is common with TRT, Modafinil, Cannabis etc the barrier as it exists today is mostly artificial. We allow people to drink alcohol, so any drug less dangerous than that shouldn't be gated

Its cost, losing kidney function and the subsequent dialysis is more expensive than a 90day check up. Besides you dont want to lose kidney function if all it took to avoid it was a 90day check.

Saying that kidney function usually involves Estimated Glomular Filtration Rate which means they measure the creatinine. Now if you happen to supplement with creatine, creatinine being the metabolised form will alter the eGFR! So if a dr doesnt ask you if you are supplementing with vitamins, minerals and other supplements, you could skew some medical tests and end up with a medical condition that doesnt exist!

You can also get quite alot off your pharmacy, but you need to know what to say, so some online pharmacys are better to use to work out what to say.

For example, if you want to get hold of Testogel here in the UK, for males its a nice pick me up and its being used in South Africa for dementia treatment, you need to say your T levels are below a certain amount. If you get rejected, you lower the amount on another website and then you can eventually work out what the level is that lets you have a testogel prescription!

Its not too hard to game the medical system for low risk drugs, for everything else you have various people who already qualify and through word of mouth have been known to sell on their meds because the Dr might sometimes up the dose if there is no response or told there is no response. SSRI's are like this. In theory a blood test measuring the 5-Hydroxyindoleacetic acid from the jugular vein will test if someone is taking SSRI's but they also do other things which go undocumented until some published scientific study highlights it.

To be honest though, the best drugs are vitamins and supplements, the number of medical studies I've read highlighting negative effects is quite shocking. Take https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphosphonate#History It was first used for bone problems in the 1960's but the technology wasnt around to explain exactly what it was doing until the 1990's! Loads of studies slate the use of Bisphonates but these are recent like post millennium studies.

In fact you go through Google Scholar, you can see a trend from the first studies published in the 1800's where medicine was largely using what was found in the body, so B12 deficiency was eating raw liver, then from WW1 to WW2 patented drugs started to appear and thats when modern medicine started, but it is a case of medicine is restricted by the technology so AI in medicine is big business.

This gives you an idea of how the medical profession work, drug companies develop something run a battery of tests and then see if they can get it licenced and sold as a treatment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bupropion#History This is another drug designed for one thing but they noticed it had smoking cessation properties so it got relicensed.

Painkillers even the common ones like ibuprofen and paracetamol are also dangerous drugs. Paracetamol will destroy your bones and your kidneys dont like ibuprofen.

This is the history of Ecstasy aka molly aka mdma TLDR,

1912 German pharma Merck developed the compound for blood clotting, didnt work so got shelved.

1950's US Army dust off the compound and get university of Michigan to study it.

1973 results declassified.

1978 https://twitter.com/DrAShulgin a former Dow chemicals chemist into his psychoactive drugs looks at it and publishes a report "the drug appears to evoke an easily controlled altered state of consciousness with emotional and sensual overtones. It can be compared in its effects to marijuana, to psilocybin devoid of the hallucinatory component, or to low levels of MDA"

Psychotherapists start using it.

1980's its getting popular and DEA start to take notice.

1985 DEA get it banned, people having too much fun! https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3931692/

Medicine is like chemical hacking of the body.

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