Name: Mark Cuban Doesn’t Want to Be President, He Wants a New Healthcare System
Uploaded: 2025-11-07T18:40:00Z
Duration: 11 min 29 s
Description: Mark Cuban is tackling one of the biggest challenges in the U.S.: the healthcare industry. In a conversation with WSJ’s Kate Linebaugh, he talks about his drug company, how he markets it and the obstacles he faces.

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Mark Cuban is tackling one of the biggest challenges in the U.S.: the healthcare industry. In a conversation with WSJ’s Kate Linebaugh, he talks about his drug company, how he markets it and the obstacles he faces. Photo: The Wall Street Journal

https://m.wsj.net/video/20251107/72ffcffa-1e7c-4778-a3f0-202585c218f7/1/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

Mark Cuban is tackling one of the biggest challenges in the U.S.: the healthcare industry. In a conversation with WSJ’s Kate Linebaugh, he talks about his drug company, how he markets it and the obstacles he faces.

Mark Cuban Doesn’t Want to Be President, He Wants a New Healthcare System

If you were president, what would you do?

The government never would've been closed. We wouldn't have all of this infighting. We'd be a country as opposed to two parties trying to battle it out.

So does that mean you would wanna be president?

No, I have no interest in being president.

Zero interest?

Zero.

Never?

I'm just not a good kissing babies type. You know?

Mark Cuban doesn't want to be president, but he does want to overhaul one of the biggest challenges in the US, the healthcare system. And he's trying to do that with his company, Cost Plus Drugs, which is tackling the issue of affordable drug pricing. But in his eyes, that's just the beginning. I spoke with Cuban about Cost Plus Drugs and the thorniness of the drug business at the "Wall Street Journal"'s Future of Health event in DC. So in 2018 you get an email.

From Dr. Alex Oshmyansky, and he wanted to create, it was a cold email. He wanted to create a compounding pharmacy that made sterile injectable drugs that were on short supply. And he made it clear to me that, you know, these generic drugs like Pitocin and you know, sterile water and pediatric cancer drugs go on short supply, which made no sense to me. And I thought, that's interesting, but that's not big enough to really have a huge impact. There was other companies that could do that. And it was right around the time the pharma bro, Martin Shkreli, was going to jail. And he had just, you know, he had, in the past, jacked up the price of a generic drug called Daraprim, like 7500%. I'm like, "Alex, how does this happen?" And you start digging in, and the first thing you notice about the pharmacy industry and all of healthcare is that it's incredibly opaque by design. Because when an industry is opaque, then the biggest companies not only get to, you know, charge whatever they want, and nobody knows until it's too late. But you also get regulatory capture, because no one really can tell you what a good price is, bad price is, and obviously-

So you were like, this is great business.

This is a great opportunity.

I want in.

Exactly.

Because you wanted more opaque practice or were you-

No, that's why we are transparent.

Oh!

Because you know, when you look at the healthcare industry, for the most part, people trust their doctors. But when you ask them about the economics of the healthcare industry and do they trust it, people laugh. And does anybody here trust the economic side of the healthcare industry?

Audience: No.

Do you like the way things are done? So it was an easy business opportunity, you know? But more importantly, it was an easy fix to help patients.

But did you go into it seeking to make money or seeking to fix healthcare?

Both, you know, and when I say make money, not to maximize my income, but to make enough money that we could reinvest and create new opportunities and help more people.

How has it gone?

We're killing it.

Can you define that?

By word or-

In the numbers?

Oh, the numbers. It's up and to the right. I mean, we've helped millions of people and we continue to grow.

Kate: How many customers do you have?

I don't even know, but it's, you know, like I said, we've helped millions of people.

You left "Shark Tank" for this?

Yeah. Because every time I get an email, which is almost weekly, of somebody saying, you know, "I was gonna have to spend $900 a month for my cancer medication. And I was telling my wife, don't do it, because I'm gonna die. You know, it's just a question of a year or two anyways, so might as well just hasten it. But then we saw Cost Plus Drugs, and it cost me $21 a month instead of 900." It's worth it.

What's the biggest obstacle you have?

The biggest obstacle we have, and hopefully some of you are in here, is getting brand medications. And we, all the generics, we have pretty much every single generic, thousands of them. The manufacturers love working with us, but there's not necessarily an alignment with brands because of the power that PBMs have. And so the PBMs across the Big Six control 90-plus percent of prescriptions through their formularies. And they've made it very clear to some of the big brands that we'd like to carry that if you work with Cost Plus Drugs, we will diminish your portfolio on our formulary. Now why would they do that? What are they afraid of, this little pipsqueak company? Well, if you look what we did to specialty generics, first of all, the idea that a pill is considered special. I mean, all drugs are special in their own way, but all of you probably have in your insurance plan for your pharmacy benefits, a specialty tier, it's a pill. There's nothing special. That's just an excuse for your PBM to charge you more or charge your company more.

Why is it that you got into this business, which has all of these different players, and you've turned your ire at the PBMs?

Because they suck. They do nothing for patients. I mean, I ask this all the time. Is there any one thing that a PBM does that is unique and differentiated? Anybody feel free to raise their hands? No one's ever raised their hands. One guy did and said they pay really good rebates. You know, it's just, they have leverage, because they accumulated across the biggest six of them, 270 million lives in their formularies, which means when you go to these big brands in particular, right, they need to have access to the formulary. If they're not on that formulary, then the insurance companies aren't gonna cover it, which means the patient has to pay everything out of pocket as if they're uninsured. Now, some brands have enough market strength to be able to dictate, and you know, they'll be on there, but they have other drugs in their portfolio where they may not, and you would think that GLP-1s would be enough market strength. Well, one of the biggest PBMs kicked off Lily's GLP-1, right? Kicked it off, because they auctioned off that formulary, and got more money that way. That's just not the way it should be. It should be you and your doctor figure it out and you do what's best for your health, not what's best for the bank account of a PBM that auction off access to the formulary. That's just wrong in every single way. And by the way, if there's any CEOs here, you guys are the ones that sign the contracts for the insurance plans that use these big PBMs. And while you're doing that, you complain about how much your healthcare benefits cost went up while signing a contract that forces your healthcare benefits to go up. Now I understand that it's not a core competency necessarily of a CEO to know all these things, but if you are a CEO, it's your fault, fix it. If you're not a CEO, go talk to your CEO or CFO or HR person and tell them we don't wanna do business with the biggest insurance companies and PBMs, 'cause they're the ones that are pushing up prices. They'll say, the big PBMs will tell you, "Look, if it weren't for us, prices would be higher." Yet at the same time, if someone's in their deductible phase, they make that patient pay the full retail price. If you're a multi-hundred billion dollar company, and you can't negotiate better than full retail price for patients, you suck at your job. And that's what these PBMs do. And it's your boss's, or if you're the CEO, your fault for signing these deals.

What, just to maybe-

And by the way, if you're a manufacturer, particularly a brand manufacturer, and you know how bad it sucks dealing with the big PBMs, and you're using them for your own benefits, you double suck.

And have you talked with them about this?

Talked with who?

The PBMs?

No.

Why not?

Hi, big PBMs. My name is Mark. I know you do hundreds of billions in revenue and have hundreds of millions of customers. Please do what I say. We don't work with them, we work outside of them, because by working with them, then we're kind of party to it. But it also creates a dependency that we don't want.

How are you getting the word out?

Word of mouth.

Word of mouth.

My big mouth, and, but I mean, if you just think about it, if you save somebody, you know, a hundred, 500, a thousand dollars, $5,000 a month on a cancer drug, what are they gonna do? They're gonna tell their doctors that they just saved all this money. They're gonna tell everybody else in the Facebook group, they saved all this money, where at the hospital, they're telling everybody they saved all this money. And you know, when somebody who has the same malady as you do is telling you to buy their drugs because they just saved all this money, then people talk to each other.

But you have other approaches to marketing that are a little more creative. And we'd like to cue the video, please.

Oh! ♪ Groupies with a mic in my palm ♪ ♪ I flip supply chains like it's dot com ♪ ♪ Cost Plus cutting middleman quick ♪ ♪ I make meds, Chief, you just talk slick ♪ ♪ You're on "Shark Tank," but this a shark pit ♪ ♪ Oh, your billions can't buy you a flow this slick ♪ ♪ You're a businessman, I'm a ♪

Maybe one more time. Could we see it one more time?

No, that's enough.

Oh, that's enough. Okay.

So that was not me rapping. I mean, it was me, but it was not literally me rapping. If you saw in there, there was Sora, right, which is AI video. And so when it came out and I got the ability to use it, I was trying to learn how to use it more and more and more. And they have the ability in there when you, it's called a cameo when you, you know, train it, train it on your face and everything, and make it available to other people to use, like I didn't create that, somebody else did. But I put a constraint on there that whatever video you used me for, the end of it had to show the Cost Plus Drugs logo. So thousands of people are like, they're not nearly as nice or funny as that one, but thousands of people are putting out.

I've seen you like flipping burgers at McDonald's.

Oh yeah. If you go to Sora and just look at 'em and just put my name in there. MCuban's my username.

We've got one more.

Okay, go ahead.

I'm introducing ChatGPT, an AI assistant that can write code, answer questions, and make any business more productive. We're seeking $10 million for 5% of the company.

Sam, I'll be straight with you. It's cool tech, but as a business-

How does that-

Thank God it's only 10 seconds long, right? That's the max, like I was showing these guys, it just cracks me up, right? And so you want to keep on putting content out there to keep people coming back, because when you put something new out, then they can then create something out of what I put out there. So I put one when I was on the plane, I did one with me winning the world championship of somersaulting. And I did, and there's more people that kind of replicated over. I did one while we were waiting, I did one where there was a merry-go-round world championship where everybody ran and he kept on going faster and faster, and people were flying up, and I won the trophy. Thank you. So it's just stupid as hell a lot of times, but you know it's just gonna pick up more and more utilization and use, right? And this is only the first inning, so I wanna learn how it works. So I'm best prepared to put it to work for Cost Plus Drugs and everything I do, and just knowing the technology.

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