Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company launched a new product for healthcare providers as it continues to disrupt the pharmacy space and set a tone for more pricing transparency: a marketplace to obtain medications in shortage.
The company revealed in a Feb. 14 post on X that it had medications in stock for healthcare providers including etoposide, amoxicillin-potassium clavulanate and capecitabine.
Healthcare providers can register to join the marketplace here. The company's goal is to cut out the middleman and provide drugs directly to patients and providers at a lower cost. Cost Plus has a flat 15% markup for all products.
"We started this company as an effort to disrupt the drug industry and to do our best to end ridiculous drug prices," Mr. Cuban wrote in a letter on the company's website.
Surgeons see and admire what Mr. Cuban is doing in the healthcare space.
"He has great ideas, money to support his ideas and guts to take on the establishment," Anthony Melillo, MD, founder of Bay Oaks Orthopaedics & Sports Medicine in Houston, told Becker's last year.
Nadeem Goraya, MD, chair of the department of medicine at Bakersfield (Calif.) Memorial Hospital is excited about Cost Plus as well.
"I think it is the tip of a very large iceberg and hopefully new startups will spring out of this," he told Becker's. "Pharmacies are places patients are being taken advantage of in broad daylight and, as Americans, we accept it as normal, and it is clearly not normal."
Nontraditional healthcare companies have also taken notice of Mr. Cuban's disruption in the healthcare space, including Walgreens. The company's CEO Tim Wentworth said during an investor call that he wanted to "give patients the Cost Plus experience" when they visit his company's retail pharmacies. Cigna's Express Scripts and CVS have also transitioned to more transparent pricing.
Cost Plus now has more than 2,000 drugs available with transparent pricing online.