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How Mark Cuban helped a Cherry Hill business exec cut prices for the drug that keeps him alive
Philadelphia Inquirer link: https://www.inquirer.com/health/mark-cuban-drug-costs-drew-katz-rare-disease-20230623.html
For decades, the drug that keeps Drew Katz alive sold for less than $1 a pill. Then its manufacturer started to raise the list price — slowly at first, then sharply, increasing it in 2015 to more than $200 a dose. Even when generic versions came along to treat the condition, called Wilson disease, the price stayed high.
It made no sense to Katz, 51, who needs the drug to prevent a toxic buildup of copper in his body. A Cherry Hill business executive and the son of the late Inquirer co-owner Lewis Katz, he can afford the medication. But he knew others could not — and it outraged him that the price didn’t seem to follow the laws of supply and demand.
Unlike most patients with a rare disease, Katz was in a position to take on the problem. Through his family’s NBA connections, he knew another businessman who had experience with the opaque world of U.S. drug pricing: billionaire Mark Cuban.
The result: Cost Plus Drug Co., an online pharmacy that Cuban cofounded, is collaborating with a generic drug maker, Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories, to sell the drug direct to consumers for $3.55 a pill. In announcing the plan on Tuesday, Cost Plus also said it would sell an alternative treatment for about $4.40 a pill.
It made no sense to Katz, 51, who needs the drug to prevent a toxic buildup of copper in his body. A Cherry Hill business executive and the son of the late Inquirer co-owner Lewis Katz, he can afford the medication. But he knew others could not — and it outraged him that the price didn’t seem to follow the laws of supply and demand.
Unlike most patients with a rare disease, Katz was in a position to take on the problem. Through his family’s NBA connections, he knew another businessman who had experience with the opaque world of U.S. drug pricing: billionaire Mark Cuban.
The result: Cost Plus Drug Co., an online pharmacy that Cuban cofounded, is collaborating with a generic drug maker, Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories, to sell the drug direct to consumers for $3.55 a pill. In announcing the plan on Tuesday, Cost Plus also said it would sell an alternative treatment for about $4.40 a pill.
- more at link -
To learn more about Cost Plus Drugs (link): https://costplusdrugs.com/
Stories about Mark Cuban and Cost Plus Drugs have been posted before on DU, and this is the most recent. The company is not a pharmaceutical manufacturer; they partner with manufacturers so that generic (no-brand) drugs are available to average Americans at amazing low prices. (I have no financial interest in this company or any other pharmaceutical company.)
