Businessman Mark Cuban is making it his “mission” to shake up U.S. health care.
Cuban is known for owning the Dallas Mavericks and for his role as an angel investor on the ABC reality TV show “Shark Tank.”
He hasn’t shied away from the political arena as a prominent critic of President Trump. But Cuban says he has no interest in running for higher office, opting instead to disrupt health care.
“If I could change health care in this country, that would be amazing,” Cuban said in an interview for The Hill’s “Health Next Summit.”
For Cuban, that starts with his company Cost Plus Drugs, which launched in 2022 with the goal of pharmacies leapfrogging middleman wholesalers.
“I’m not saying I’m going to be able to pull it off, but I know we’ve had a significant impact with CostPlusDrugs.com, and I think getting there and focusing on that and just changing people’s lives for the better on the health care side, that’s my mission,” he said.
Cuban said the company carries more than 2,500 medications and that when customers type in the name of a medication they immediately see its actual cost followed by the markup, which is always 15 percent. The businessman said the company’s transparency is what sets it apart from its competitors, which include Amazon Prime, Costco and GoodRX.
“As crazy as it sounds, we are the only company that publishes their entire price list,” he said.
However, Cuban said Cost Plus Drugs has run into the roadblock of pharmacy benefit managers, also known as PBMs. Those are the intermediaries that manage drug coverage for businesses across the U.S. PBMs and brand drug manufacturers negotiate discounts in the form of rebates, and the PBM then passes most of the rebates on to employers.
Critics argue PBMs do not always find the best deals and are forcing independent drug stores out of business by not paying them enough to cover their costs. The PBM industry, on the other hand, said PBMs save employers and patients billions on drug costs.
“When we talk to manufacturers and we say, look, why can’t we get in the same rebate programs as these big PBMs, they tell us without telling us that they don’t want to lose their position on the formulary, which is hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in sales,” Cuban said.
“The big PBMs just won’t let them deal with us. That is our problem. Period. End of story,” he added.
But Cuban said he and his team are slowly making progress through going to drug manufacturer CEOs and working with pass-through PBMs, which eliminate discounts, rebates and fees directly to the payer.
“All of the rebates are passed through so you actually get significant savings, and slowly but surely we’re having inroads,” he said.
Cuban is also touting the company’s partnership with independent pharmacies through paying them a $12 fill fee per prescription, fully reimbursing the pharmacy and allowing them to make a profit.
“I want independent pharmacies to stay in business,” Cuban said. “I think as a country, we don’t want to see pharmacy deserts. We need them to stay in business. All those people, senior citizens that have been going to the same pharmacist for decades and that pharmacist knows them, they know their family, that’s important. That saves lives.”
“The problem is that the biggest PBMs won’t fully reimburse,” he said.
Cuban argued that Cost Plus Drugs would be able to dramatically cut the cost of brand medication if the pharmaceutical industry allows the company to participate in rebate programs.
“The amount of money that we can save taxpayers and patients will be, to paraphrase, like you’ve never seen before. Most in history ever,” he said, appearing to mimic Trump.
Cuban said he is hopeful the Trump administration will work to lower prices through the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). However, he added that he believes Republicans have been afraid to work with him, particularly those from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Cuban described the approach of the Trump administration and DOGE head Elon Musk as “ready, aim, fire,” which he added “is no way to govern.”
“Particularly when the you-know-what, you know, rolls downhill onto the small-to-medium-sized communities and cities where all of a sudden, who knows how many people are losing jobs, who knows how many companies have to close, because their grants have been cut, and who knows the impact on that community in terms of services they’re going to be able to offer, raising taxes,” he said.
Cuban is one of the most outspoken critics of Trump from the business community, and he opted to campaign with then-Vice President Kamala Harris last year.
Cuban said he does not particularly care about the future of the Democratic Party because of his status as an Independent. However, he encouraged Democrats to go into communities to get a sense of how Trump’s tariffs and DOGE cuts are playing out locally.
“You’re not going to get people to all of the sudden turn on Donald Trump, but what you can do, as we’ve seen with some of the town halls, is get people to turn on some of the Republican House members who are going to have to make a really tough choice,” he said.
“If their communities are being negatively impacted by the all-at-once cuts of DOGE and the impact of the tariffs, well put the pressure on those House Republicans to make a choice. Either you support Donald Trump or you go against Donald Trump and say these tariffs and these cuts are awful for my town or you lose your job,” he said.
