Mark Cuban plans to increase healthcare price transparency by making all future Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Co. partnership contracts public.
During a conversation with Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show" Monday night, Cuban pivoted the conversation from the Dallas Mavericks to discuss his main priority: shaking up healthcare.
Related article: Community Health Systems first to buy drugs made by Cost Plus
The company has made strides in recent years by making generic drugs more affordable and partnering with retailers, health systems and pharmacies to drive down cost of care.
Here are three things Cuban said about his focus on healthcare.
1. All Cost Plus Drugs partners will have to agree to public contracts
Cuban said the company continues to seek partnerships with providers and all contracts will be available for public scrutiny. That means providers have to agree to the transparency requirements.
Cuban and Stewart discussed how the issue of healthcare price transparency goes beyond drug costs, adding that cost differences between hospitals including for emergency care, such as treating heart attacks, is an issue for patients.
"We're just getting it approved today — we're going to publish all contracts," Cuban told Stewart. "For my companies, we're saying: If you want to do business with us ... we're going to publish them and put them online for anybody to see all of our pricing."
In an email to Modern Healthcare, Cuban said he had nothing to announce Tuesday.
2. Pharmacy benefit managers are the issue
PBMs, which are broadly under scrutiny on Capitol Hill, are the biggest obstacle for price transparency, as they keep negotiations out of the public eye, Cuban said.
"If you're one of those big companies that cover 150 million employees across the country, that's who you negotiate with," Cuban said. "And the first rule, when they negotiate, they say is, 'You can't talk about this.' It's like 'Fight Club.' You cannot say what your price is. You can't say what we're doing in our negotiation — and they got so big doing that, that nobody ever questioned them."
3. Cuban's main focus is disrupting healthcare
Cuban said he plans to continue shaking up healthcare's status quo by continuing to focus on price transparency.
"You want to talk about pharmacy, what could be better than f***ing up the healthcare system in the United States of America to make it so it's affordable?" he told Stewart.
Cuban said when he's 95 years old, he'd rather look back and say, "I f***ed up healthcare."
Cuban said Cost Plus Drug has made progress in significantly impacting the drug market by pushing generics and offering prescriptions for a fraction of the cost of other pharmacy companies.
When Stewart asked what the entrepreneur has his sights set on, Cuban said "Healthcare, healthcare."
