Estrogen Patch Shortage: Who Profits From Your Prescriptions with Mark Cuban

Mark Cuban (0:00)

It's a scam from top to bottom. Nobody looks at the economics of health care and says it's working well.

Mary Claire Haver (0:05)

So in the past two years, estrogen patch prescriptions have nearly tripled.

Mark Cuban (0:10)

Oh my god, at least 10x.

Mary Claire Haver (0:11)

It was hundreds of dollars for a simple tube, and you were selling it for $13.45 or something.

Mark Cuban (0:18)

Shows you our markup's only 15%.

Mary Claire Haver (0:20)

It's on short supply because money?

Mark Cuban (0:22)

Yes, if it's harder to get, you can price it more.

Mary Claire Haver (0:24)

This can't be legal.

Mark Cuban (0:25)

These middlemen, too big to care, don't give a shit. My next dollar is not going to change my life, but my next dollar might save somebody's life.

Mary Claire Haver (0:32)

Less than 9% of NIH grant money went to women's health over the last decade. Why do you think that is?

Mark Cuban (0:37)

It's run by men. What was truly missing was in his trust. I'll give you the craziest example, and that's how I found out about the everolimus.

Mary Claire Haver (0:55)

The views and opinions expressed on unPAUSED are those of talent and guests alone and are provided for informational and entertainment purposes only.

No part of this podcast or any related materials are intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

Every time I post about what medication cost on social media, my comment section explodes. One woman pays $14 for her estrogen patch, the next one pays $90. Same drug, same dose, same country. And underneath almost all of it, the same question asked a hundred different ways. Why isn't the cost consistent? Two women can be handed the same prescription on the same day and pay wildly different prices, and neither of them can understand why. That is not an accident. It's how the system was built. And lately, a lot of you can't get your estrogen patch at all, at any price. Here's why it's so confusing. Between your doctor and your pharmacy, sit a handful of middlemen between drug companies and your health insurance. They're the ones negotiating medicine prices and deciding which drugs your insurance will cover. My guest, Mark Cuban, is an entrepreneur and investor, many of you may know as one of the sharks from Shark Tank. He has built and run many different types of companies, including the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company. He co-founded the company in January of 2022 and spent four years inside the machinery of how drugs get priced, bought, and distributed in this country. With the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company, he did the thing this industry treats as radical. He published the price of each medication with transparent pricing and a limited markup. It's all right there on his website, and today we're going to talk about how this has fundamentally changed the pricing of medications in the United States. I'm Dr. Mary Claire Haver, a board-certified obstetrician and gynecologist and certified menopause practitioner and adjunct professor at the University of Texas Medical Branch. Welcome to unPAUSED, the podcast where we cut through the silence and talk about what it really takes for women to thrive in the second half of life.

Mark Cuban, welcome to unPAUSED.

Mark Cuban (3:11)

Thanks for having me.

Mary Claire Haver (3:13)

So, I'm excited to have you on the show, mostly because you are a problem solver, and we have big problems in women's health and supply chain for our estrogen patch, which I brought mine in today. What are you doing differently with the Cost Plus Drugs versus me going to CVS or Walgreens?

Mark Cuban (3:33)

So it's costplusdrugs.com is our site where what makes us different initially is when you go, we show you our actual costs. When you put in a strategy or whatever it may be and it comes up, we'll show you what our cost is, what our markup is, and that typically means we're going to sell it for less than everybody else. So that's our initial goal, to make sure it's affordable because it doesn't matter if it's available, if you can't afford it. And so affordability is a key for us, transparency is a key for us. But like everybody else, we're very aware that there's a shortage of a lot of HRT therapies. And so what we've done is rather than having one vendor or sometimes we'll have two, but typically one vendor, we've gone out and sourced every source that we possibly can find.

We've gone to the two major manufacturers and said, look, we will take every unit of inventory that you're able to give us. And it's crazy because we still can't keep up. We thought, okay, we have enough inventory, are we going to be able to sell it all? And it just flipped completely around. And because of that, the two primary vendors that we use have completely different pricing.