On stage in the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing auditorium, Mark Cuban, co-founder of the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company, “Shark Tank” star, and venture capital investor sparred with Penn’s Ezekiel Emanuel on the tangled issues of the county’s prescription drug pricing model. And what better authorities to debate the matter—Cuban, whose Cost Plus Drugs company is battling to disrupt the current entrenched pricing model, and Emanuel, Diane v.S. Levy & Robert M. Levy Professor, Vice Provost for Global Initiatives, and prolific author on the subject who was a White House consultant and key architect of the Affordable Care Act.
Billed as a Fireside Chat on the Drug Pricing Failures in America, the Cuban-Emanuel event at Penn was hosted by Emanuel’s fall Health Care Management Course “Health Care Reform and the Future of the American Health Care System” in collaboration with the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics (LDI) and the Wistar Institute.
The event came about as a collegial clash of sorts between Emanuel and Cuban after Emanuel authored an opinion piece in STAT suggesting that Cuban was doing good work but questioning the magnitude of impact Cost Plus Drugs will have because it only deals in generic drugs even as branded drugs drive the majority of costs in the prescription drug market. In January of 2022, Cuban and partner Alex Oshmyansky, MD, PhD launched the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company, a privately held entity with multiple investors.
In January, Forbes profiled Cuban and spotlighted how, in an incredibly short period of time, he has achieved a dramatic disruption of the U.S. prescription drug distribution market: “Two years in, Mark Cuban’s company keeps shaking up the generic pharmaceutical space. It added another 1,000 medicines in December to the list of now 2,200 drugs it sells directly to patients. The firm now offers prescription drugs—mostly generics—to over 2 million members.”
“This industry is the easiest industry I’ve ever disrupted,” Cuban told Emanuel. “And all it took was transparency and just telling the truth.”
Read more at Penn LDI.
