A recent study has found that Medicare could save almost $4 billion per year by adopting the tactics of Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban.
Cuban's side business, Cost Plus Drug Company, was launched in early 2022 and offers a direct-to-consumer online pharmacy.
It's able to provide generic medications for a lot less than the name brands by selling "at the cost of ingredients and manufacturing plus 15% margin, $3 pharmacy dispensing fee, and $5 shipping fee," per a new study from Brigham and Women's Hospital. This study concludes that if Medicare used that service, it could have saved more than $3.5 billion in prescription drug prices in a single year.
The researchers looked at the costs of 89 prescriptions via Cost Plus compared to what Medicare paid for the same meds.
The study's leading author Dr. Hussain Saleem Lalani wrote that Medicare "could save a lot more money if it had stricter policies on how it paid for drugs."
"There’s a lot more reforms that could be done to optimize the generic drug pricing system, and we should really consider doing those things to lower costs for patients," Lalani wrote, via NBC.
Medicare Part D plans paid out $38 billion in generic drugs in 2020.
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