High-profile businessman Mark Cuban has launched The Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Co. — a direct-to-consumer pharmacy that buys generic drugs from manufacturers and sells them to consumers at the cost of ingredients with a 15 percent markup for acquisition, a $3 fee for labor and a $5 fee for shipping.One of the most challenging conundrums in modern American life is the high cost of medical care and prescription medicine, especially compared to other wealthy countries.
Cuban owns the Dallas Mavericks and is a featured investor on the entrepreneurship-related television show “Shark Tank.” His initial fortune came from building and selling tech companies, in particular Broadcast.com, which he sold to Yahoo.com in 1999, netting about a billion dollars for himself. Yahoo’s acquisition of Broadcast.com was considered one of the worst internet transactions of all time after it shut down the service in 2002. Cuban has good timing.
Since Cost Plus does not take insurance, users must compare the all-in cost of their current medications — accounting for their deductibles — to an out-of-pocket cost for this service.My friend Venessa is the only one among my social media networks who replied that she uses Cost Plus, which partly tells me that the Cuban experiment is in its early days.
The monthly cost of Zoloft is $150 to $400, depending on dosage and one’s insurance. Because she is paying out of pocket, Venessa switched to the generic equivalent, called Sertraline, and she buys it from Cost Plus for $8.90 per month. She was pretty excited to tell me about Cost Plus and said she’s told her friends to try it as well.
It is not clear to me — and the company did not respond to my query — how many customers Cost Plus has acquired since January. It launched with a list of 100 generics. Since then, it has expanded to 200 generics, covering 58 medical conditions.