The Breakdown – MOST PEOPLE KNOW Mark Cuban as a celebrity entrepreneur and investor, the guy you have seen on Shark Tank or courtside at Dallas Maverick games.1
Those of us who follow health policy know him as something else. He’s the business mogul who said he knew how to sell prescription drugs at a big discount, and proceeded to do just that.
Now Cuban says he has more ideas—not just on how to fix prescription drug pricing, but on how to reform the U.S. health care system more broadly. Earlier this month, I got to hear some of them when he sat down for an interview via Zoom.
As I told him at the top, I’m generally skeptical of people in his position.
There’s this long, well-known history of business figures vowing to fix health care—because, supposedly, the insights they have from finance, tech, or retail will allow them to make our famously dysfunctional system more functional.
That’s what all the breathless headlines said in 2018, for example, when Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, and Jamie Dimon announced their joint venture to revolutionize health care.
The venture went bust three years later, which is pretty much the way all of these projects have gone.
Health care, it turns out, really is different from any other business. Plus it’s harder and maybe less fun than picking investments—or, if you’re Bezos, building rockets and burning down the Washington Post editorial page.
But Cuban stuck with health care, a subject he says first piqued his interest following the 2015 controversy over a massive (500 percent) price increase for drug to treat a common parasitic infection.
A few years later, Cuban got a cold pitch from a doctor interested in selling generic drugs for rare conditions, where shortages were common. Cuban was hooked …
