Mark Cuban slams the pharma business: Nobody says "wow, that’s well run"

Mark Cuban says the idea for his Cost Plus Drugs startup originated from a cold email.

Transcript

00:00Everybody thinks it's f***ed up, you know, and they're right.

00:03There's nobody who looks at the healthcare system or the pharmaceutical industry and says,

00:08wow, that's well run. That's just the way we want it. It's great for us.

00:12And so it originated because I got a cold email from a Dr. Alex Oshmayansky.

00:17He wanted to create a pharmacy in Denver that manufactured generic drugs that were on shortage.

00:24We started talking and I think I said, that's interesting. I didn't know generic drugs went

00:27on shortage. Didn't seem to make sense. But it was right around the time that the

00:31pharma bro was going to jail. And I started digging in and looking at, you know, what he

00:36had done. And this guy just basically bought, you know, a whole year's worth of manufacturing

00:43for a drug called Daraprim, a generic drug, and then just jacked up the price.

00:46And then as I started digging up, digging more, it was obvious there, this was not an

00:51efficient market. It was very inefficient. It was very opaque. You know, if you think

00:55about what happens when you get a prescription from your doctor, they say, hey, you need this

00:59medication. And the next thing that comes out of the mouth is what pharmacy do you use?

01:04There's absolutely no understanding or no interest in whether or not you can afford it,

01:08whether, you know, whether your insurance, how it impacts your insurance, your deductible,

01:11your coinsurance, whatever. And so the more I dug in, I was like, okay, nobody knows what the

01:18price of anything is. If we create a company and we, A, limited our margins and B, published

01:26all of our pricing in our price list, then maybe we can have an impact.