Mark Cuban’s Drug Offers Prescription Medications at INSANE Discounts
What’s happening
Mark Cuban started a company that offers generic versions of medications at extremely low prices. A recent study calculated that Medicare could save billions with this business model.
Why it matters
Life-saving prescription drugs in the United States are often too expensive, especially for people without insurance. This is really a very thought-provoking moment for most of US citizens.
Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban’s new pharmaceutical company, which publicly launched in January, is selling hundreds of generic, commonly used medications with absolutely massive cost cuts. And I mean massive.
The generic version of Actos — prescribed for patients with diabetes and typically sold for $74.40 at standard pharmacies — is available for $5.40 for 30 pills, according to the website. The generic version of Apriso — prescribed for patients with gastrointestinal disease and sold for $122.70 at standard pharmacies — goes for $36.60 for 30 pills.
And that’s just a snippet. The medication ledger of the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company (yes, that’s the full name) is long. The drugs treat conditions ranging from mild migraines to acid reflux to cancer to neurological disorders. Cost Plus Drugs also sells the generic versions of a variety of mental health medications like Wellbutrin, used to treat depression, and Adapin, sometimes prescribed for anxiety.
Overall, Cost Plus Drugs appears to operate in the name of combatting a few very pressing public health issues in the United States. “If you don’t have insurance or have a high deductible plan, you know that even the most basic medications can cost a fortune,” Cuban said in the company’s mission statement.
“Every American should have access to safe, affordable medicines,” he adds, and “we also think that it is just as important to introduce transparency to the pricing of drugs so patients know they are getting a fair price.”
With regard to the latter, the Cost Plus Drugs website outlines precisely what you might be wondering right now. How is it possible to slash drug prices?
For 109 generic medications sold by Cost Plus Drugs on Feb. 8 of this year, the research team identified the price — including pharmacy dispensing and shipping fees — for the minimum and maximum quantities available to sell in bulk. The minimum quantity is referred to 30 counts, and the maximum to 90 counts.
Then, the team looked up 2020 Medicare Part D spending for 89 of those 109 drugs. They left out 20 because those were the ones deemed incomparable to parallel, retail generic medication at a close-enough degree.
Now those are just the facts we have found on the internet in various articles.
After adjusting all collected prices to remove any confounding variables, like ingredient cost between 2020 and 2022, the team concluded that if Medicare purchased generic drugs in the maximum quantity supplied by Cost Plus Drugs, it could have saved $3.6 billion on 77 of 89 generic drugs in just a year 2020. If Medicare purchased them in the minimum quantity, it could have saved $1.7 billion on 42 of 89 of the drugs.
The team also said this is a conservative estimate because, since this analysis, Cost Plus Drugs had added a bunch more medications. It is an important point to be noted right? Nevertheless, the study said, “our findings suggest that Medicare is overpaying for many generic drugs.”
