Mark Cuban's pharmacy started with a cold email
On one hand, we should obviously applaud anyone doing anything to bring down drug prices.<p>On the other hand, I&#x27;m increasingly uncomfortable with just how much free marketing and PR is being applied to the &quot;Mark Cuban Pharmacy&quot; without much critical examination of what&#x27;s going on here.<p>Taking one of the examples straight from their homepage: They will sell you 30 Prozac tablets for $3.90: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;costplusdrugs.com&#x2F;medications&#x2F;fluoxetine-10mg-capsule&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;costplusdrugs.com&#x2F;medications&#x2F;fluoxetine-10mg-capsul...</a> They list the &quot;Retail price at other pharmacies&quot; as $22.80 and claim to save you $18.90. Fantastic, right?<p>Except nobody should actually be paying $22.80 for generic Prozac. You can drive to any local Walmart and get it for $4 <i>and</i> they will bill your insurance, which will count toward your deductible. (Walmart has a list of their $4 and other cheap prescriptions here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.walmart.com&#x2F;cp&#x2F;4-prescriptions&#x2F;1078664" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.walmart.com&#x2F;cp&#x2F;4-prescriptions&#x2F;1078664</a> )<p>Mark Cuban&#x27;s pharmacy, however, refuses to deal with your insurance and they&#x27;re going to charge an extra $5.00 shipping at checkout. So now you&#x27;re paying basically twice as much to Mark Cuban&#x27;s pharmacy even though they&#x27;re telling you the entire way that you&#x27;re actually saving money.<p>I also checked my personal insurance and my negotiated rate for the same medication is also less than $5 at local pharmacies.<p>Now of course it&#x27;s likely that other drugs will work out to be cheaper on Mark Cuban&#x27;s pharmacy than any other combination of your personal insurance and local pharmacies, but that&#x27;s far from guaranteed.<p>I&#x27;m concerned that Mark Cuban is capitalizing on people&#x27;s lack of understanding about how insurance works and how easy it can be to look up drug prices (use your insurance company&#x27;s website or just pick up the phone and call your pharmacy, they&#x27;ll check for you). His profit margins, however small, rely on people skipping their insurance and going straight to Mark Cuban&#x27;s pharmacy. That could be fine in some circumstance, but in others, perhaps many other cases, the customer would come out behind by opting out of their insurance.<p>I wish some media outlets would actually dig into this instead of endlessly recycling the company&#x27;s own talking points verbatim.