This Investing Billionaire Just Opened an Online Pharmacy

Mavericks owner and billionaire investor Mark Cuban has dived into the prescription drug game.

Cuban has opened up an online pharmacy that offers prescription drugs at cheaper prices.

According to a press release by the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company (CCPDC), the strategy behind offering lower prices to consumers is to “bypass middlemen and outrageous markups.”

In its press release, the company also pointed out medications on its site that offer significant savings.

One such drug is Imatinib, a drug used to treat leukemia. It has a retail price of $9,657 per month and a price of $120 per month with a voucher. MCCPDC offers it for $47 per month, according to the press release.

Other drugs with savings include Mesalamine, an ulcerative colitis treatment, and Colchicine, a gout treatment, according to MCCPDC.

MCCPDC’s goal is to bring transparency to the drug pricing market and show consumers the wholesale price behind a drug.

The company eliminates the fee paid to pharmacists, pharmacies and pharmacy benefit managers that negotiate contracts with different stakeholders in the healthcare arena.

“There are numerous bad actors in the pharmaceutical supply chain preventing patients from getting affordable medicines,” Alex Oshmyansky, CEO of MCCPD said in a press release. “The only way to ensure affordable prices get through is to vertically integrate.”

Whether or not prices will be cheaper will heavily depend on the specific drug, said Joseph Antos, Wilson H. Taylor scholar in health care and retirement policy at the American Enterprise Institute.

“There’s nothing uniform about his market,” Antos says.”It’s very hard to predict … whether the reduced out-of-pocket cost is enough.”

Disclaimer: We have no position in any of the companies mentioned and have not been compensated for this article.