In his latest bid to expand access to lower-cost medicines, Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drug Company will offer discounts directly to a company created by a coalition of 40 large private and public employers, cutting out the usual middlemen in the nation’s opaque pharmaceutical supply chain.
The effort involves the Purchaser Business Group on Health, whose members will be able to fold the medicines sold by Cuban’s company into existing health benefit plans. By doing so, any employer – not just coalition members – will have an opportunity to offer their workers a new option for prescription drugs while also capturing much of the same data that is otherwise lost when employees turn to such alternatives as GoodRx for medicines.
To make this happen, the coalition will rely on its own version of a pharmacy benefit manager, a type of company that traditionally places medicines on formularies, or lists of medicines covered by health insurance. In this role, a pharmacy benefit manager typically extracts rebates from drug companies, a behind-the-scenes transaction that is often blamed for increasing consumer costs.
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