WASHINGTON — On Tuesday, Vice President Harris’ presidential campaign released a proposal to crack down on middlemen in the pharmaceutical industry.
It seems billionaire business mogul Mark Cuban had a heads up.
The campaign announcement went out to reporters’ inboxes shortly after Cuban sat down in a conference room to take questions from reporters. Cuban, who wasn’t peeking at his email as he touted the benefits of more transparency in the health care system, appeared to know the announcement was coming.
“I think they’re also supposed to be talking about transparency and PBMs today,” he hinted during a conversation hosted by the nonpartisan polling and research firm KFF.
Sure enough, the Harris campaign’s health care announcement on Tuesday included a line proposing “cracking down on pharmaceutical benefit managers to increase transparency, disclose more information on costs, and regulate other practices that raise prices.”
The tip-off is a signal of Cuban’s ties to the Harris campaign.
Dallas Mavericks minority owner Cuban left the television show “Shark Tank” earlier this year, and has since used some of his spare time to push his transparency gospel with the Harris campaign. Cuban launched Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drugs, a company that aims to lower drug costs by bypassing traditional middlemen in the pharmacy supply chain, in 2021. He’s now using his platform as a staunch, high-profile Harris advocate and informal campaign adviser to push his health care ideas.
“She said to me specifically that she likes the idea of transparency, and she sees that as a winner,” Cuban said of Harris.
He has suggested a broad range of health care ideas, including having the government require pharmacy middlemen and insurers publicly publish their contracts and making PBMs publish their costs.
Cuban also said he’s pushing a so-called subscription model to pay for expensive new medications, under which the government would pay a fixed fee to a drugmaker to treat an unlimited number of patients.
Though Cuban mentioned being interested in a position as health and human services secretary during an interview with Fox News, he now insists he was joking.
“I just like to troll,” Cuban said. He said he would not want to serve in the Harris administration “as an employee.”
His support for the Biden administration’s main achievement of allowing Medicare to negotiate prices for certain drugs was lukewarm. He maintained that providing more transparency in the health care system would “have a far greater financial impact on the country” than expanding the negotiation program.
Generally, congressional budget experts have not estimated that price transparency proposals alone would save the federal government significant sums of money. But Cuban pointed to research published last year that showed that Medicare plans could have saved up to $2.2 billion per year if they had bought seven generic drugs through Cuban’s company.
As evidence that the status quo could be shifting, Cuban cited lawsuits filed against big companies such as Wells Fargo and Johnson & Johnson challenging whether the pharmacy benefit managers the companies hire truly have their employees’ best interests at heart.
“I think we’re at a tipping point for a lot of different reasons in the economics of health care,” Cuban said.
He said his company is working on direct contracts with providers to cut middlemen out of health insurance for their employees, and Cuban plans to publicly post their contracts.