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