Employers must stop maximizing PBM drug plan discounts, says Mark Cuban

That means the primary funding mechanism for reimbursement is for workers with heart disease or a child with cancer who must pay high prescription drug copayments and deductibles, Cuban said. “That person probably doesn't have $1,500 to spare,” Cuban said.

In some cases, Cuban said, a high deductible on a drug insurance plan prevents a patient from filling a necessary prescription. “Do you really want to read that one of your employees died because you accepted a higher deductible?” Cuban asked.

Mark Cuban

Perhaps best known as one of the sharks on “Shark Tank,” Cuban began his career as a PC software reseller and video streaming website pioneer, and later became one of the owners of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team.

In 2022, he founded Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug. He said he would try to shake up the U.S. prescription drug market by introducing an easy-to-understand prescription drug pricing strategy.

Cost Plus calculates the price of medications by adding a 15% markup, a $3 pharmacy processing fee, and a $5 shipping fee to the wholesale price of a medication.

At press time, for example, Cost Plus was offering the cholesterol-lowering drug rosuvastatin for $7.10 per 30 tablets of 40 milligrams each.

GoodRx, a website that provides information on prescription drug prices, showed that large pharmacies sold the same amount of the same drug at prices ranging from $2 (on special offers) to $58.45.

The other side

Rohit Gupta, an analyst at Beghou Consulting, is among those who say Cuban may be promising more savings than his company can actually deliver.

“Cuban's commitment to transparency is positive,” Gupta wrote in a recent commentary. But his company is “really just another pharmacy. It may not be able to achieve the same volume discounts as vertically integrated competitors like CVS or Walgreens.”

The Webinar

True Rx, an Indianapolis-based pharmacist-owned pharmacy benefit manager, presented the webinar with Mark Cuban to promote its new relationship with Cost Plus. True Rx has added Cost Plus to its network as a mail-order pharmacy option.

Cuban emphasized during the webinar that his company wants to work with local pharmacies.

The large PBMs that have their own mail-order pharmacies have an incentive to drive business to their own pharmacies, put local pharmacies out of business and then drive up prices, Cuban says.

For an employer that cares about the local community, the threat that large PBMs pose to local pharmacies should be a reason to avoid the large PBMs, Cuban said.

Another reason for working with companies like True Rx and Cost Plus is that they provide prescription tracking data to employers as part of their basic benefits, Cuban said.

The big PBMs are skimping on providing data to both employers and drug manufacturers, Cuban said.

When the big PBMs send data to employer plans, “they're forcing companies to pay for their own information,” Cuban said. “That's crazy.”