Mark Cuban's pharmacy started with a cold email
beckershospitalreview.com
Mark Cuban's pharmacy started with a cold email
1–10 of 221 posts
Re: Mark Cuban's pharmacy started with a cold email
#2If 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-...
Re: Mark Cuban's pharmacy started with a cold email
#3Mark 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)
Re: Mark Cuban's pharmacy started with a cold email
#4Likely 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.
Re: Mark Cuban's pharmacy started with a cold email
#5“ 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?
Re: Mark Cuban's pharmacy started with a cold email
#6"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.
Re: Mark Cuban's pharmacy started with a cold email
#7On 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-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 )
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.
Re: Mark Cuban's pharmacy started with a cold email
#8Mark 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)
Seems like the more companies like this with varying abilities of marketing to get as widespread outreach the better.
Re: Mark Cuban's pharmacy started with a cold email
#9Mark 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)
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.
Re: Mark Cuban's pharmacy started with a cold email
#10If 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-...
Really cool, thanks!