The doctor who convinced Mark Cuban to sell drugs | Hacker News Reader

The doctor who convinced Mark Cuban to sell drugs

dmagazine.com

95 pointsrmason29 comments

To summarize this and bypass the clickbait title: Dr. Alex Oshmyansky, a child prodigy with a PhD in mathematics and a MD (worked in radiology) decided the 3 or so jobs/fellowships he was juggling weren't enough and decided to start a company selling cheaper drugs, failing a couple times in getting funding and ultimately opening a public benefit corporation, backed by Mark Cuban, who valued the concept of the project and committed strongly to it. So far the company has been moving along nicely (though it's still young).

TL;DR: Mark Cuban is funding Dr. Alex Oshmyansky's drug public-benefit company, making it less susceptible to the typical big-pharma buyouts that destroy other such companies

Thank you for this summary, I recall Dr. Oshmyansky when he first went into the PhD curriculum, time really passes you by when you forget to notice it.

Quite Inspirational; a man who had the courage to act on his convictions.

Got to be honest, I heard something about how Mark Cuban was going to make prescription drugs cheaply available to YOU, but I thought it was a scam meme targeting boomers on facebook. It had all the hallmarks of that sort of thing, a product that older people are in the market for (prescriptions), the backing of the authority of a TV celebrity, a stock photo of Cuban with all the information written as text in MS paint and no sources etc.

I can't believe it wasn't a scam!

One weird trick to lower prescription drug prices!

> According to the case, although Cuban disclosed the Mavericks’ partnership with Voyager, he has never revealed the full extent of his personal involvement in promoting the platform and the amount of compensation he’s received. The lawsuit argues that a failure to disclose this information is considered to be a violation of the anti-touting provisions of federal securities laws.

Lol... Good luck with that. The burden of proof for such things is overwhelming, and the lack of evidence in that area will hamper this case significantly.

The class action should have stuck to easier-to-prove mechanics behind this shit-show.

There is also a nonprofit effort to lower prices by manufacturing drugs that are sometimes in short supply or overpriced, where the founding hospital system (in Utah) has joined with others, & has a solid, long-term reputation.

Wikipedia said (lightly shortened): "Civica Rx is a nonprofit generic drug company founded in 2018 by national philanthropies and leading U.S. health systems[1] to reduce and prevent drug shortages in the United States and the price spikes that can accompany them. .... While serving 55 health systems and 1,500 hospitals (or 1/3 of all licensed U.S. hospital beds), Civica also supplies the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the U.S. Department of Defense, and “340B” hospitals caring for vulnerable patients in some of the country’s most underserved areas. As of January 2022, Civica provided nearly 70 million vials of essential medicines, enough to treat over 26 million patients across the United States. These numbers continue to grow as Civica moves from a start-up to a well-established societal asset, serving more patients every day. Most recently, eleven of Civica's 55+ medications are being used to help COVID-19 patients, including neuromuscular blocking agents, sedation agents and pain management medications for patients on ventilators." Etc. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civica_Rx )

https://civicarx.org/

Other prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25932233 ("The Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company" about which I don't actually know anything more.)

More HN discussion on the Mark Cuban rx company: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31652264

Oh wow, I didn't know they were looking into orphan drugs as well. Producing cheap biologics still seems to be a huge challenge unlike normal generics

> When healthcare CEO Martin Shkreli increased the cost of his company’s antiparasitic drug by 5,455 percent (from $13.50 to $750 per pill) in 2015, many were outraged. But Oshmyansky acted, because that’s what he does.

I guess Shkreli was good for something after all.

The big mistake Shkreli made was giving 100% discounts to people who weren't insured, but charging full price to insurance companies.

This is what big pharma companies do too.

It is even worse they negotiate "packages": "If you take our products A,B,C we do a 10% discount but if you take D and make sure that D' from our competitor is more expensive, we do a 15%." They do that with hospitals as well. Offering them free treatments that do good publicity against exclusivity.

I should have added /s. The funny thing is that all the other companies do exactly what he did, but because he is an upstart somehow he ended up getting all the blame.

Funny how shkreli fits into the story – he's led the criticized cost plus drugs for being a more expensive version of goodRx with inflated discounts [0]/

[0]https://martinshkreli.substack.com/p/mark-cubans-pharmacy-no...

No, that article shows it's a cheaper version of goodRx. His complaint is they are sometimes the same price as the cheapest competitor, and that they overstate the discount by not comparing their price to the actual price you'd pay a competitor.

But his first example, for example, is that they claim a 90% discount but are actually 60% of the goodRx price.

Bigger discounts are better, of course. I think many people, including myself, have been paying through the nose with "prescription coverage" which costs more than goodRx or Cost Plus Drugs.

The goodRx site is weird - it looks like a coupon site, where you go to other pharmacies and give them a coupon. I know this is exactly how goodRx works, but it doesn't exactly inspire confidence when you're buying something as serious as prescriptions. The Cost Plus Drugs site is extremely spartan, but it doesn't give off the same weird vibes as goodRx - there are less steps involved. You just order from Cost Plus Drugs and it shows up in the mail, no in-between third party involved.

Behind the scenes, to the extent significant, the third party risk when it comes to drug quality is identical and low.

Pharma charges goodRx less because it's market segmentation - they're assuming many goodRx users would otherwise just suffer without and thus generate no profit.

Some people speculate goodRx subsidizes prices by selling data. I don't find their analysis convincing as they don't explain how goodRx has data meaningfully more valuable than the data pharma already buys from other sources like pharmacies.

As if convincing Cuban is a great feat - he was also convinced to have the Mavericks partner with Voyager, a cryptocurrency platform which is now bankrupt.

It's almost as if the Russ Hannemann parody of Cuban in Silicon Valley was based on real life!

It's almost as if not all start ups/business/investments become successful, shock!

But here stands a man who is successful and does good things.

Promoting a Ponzi scheme and scamming consumers is a bit worse than a typical business failure. But sure, he does "good things."

https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/11/mark-cuban-mavericks-face-...

The cryptocurrency platform may be bankrupt, but Mark isn't.

He made money on a terrible ponzi scheme, now he made money on something good to try to improve on his reputation (which is much harder, and probably he makes less money in the good thing).

Still, he's saving lives now, US healthcare is in terrible shape.

Much better press than his disaster case study of bad if not outright total-shit management of the Dallas Mavericks regarding employees misconduct and enabling it.

Dude has zero good will with me anymore, and this is a nice start on a better direction.

As a general rule it’s pretty safe to assume that a billionaire is a greedy, selfish asshole. Otherwise they wouldn’t have got there. I really wish we would stop praising billionaires and looking at them for wisdom.

I accept all these complaints about Cuban. Twitter closed my account for criticizing his China ties.

But what have you and I done even close to as significant as bringing down the price of subscription drugs?

I have done nothing to bring down price of subscription drugs. But unlike billionaires I have also not lobbied for socially harmful things like shareholder value over everything else, tax cuts for wealthy people, privatized for maximum profit health care, abandonment of pensions, different tax treatment for income from investment vs labor and many other things.

Do you think bringing up these familiar critiques is even close to as significant as bringing down the price of subscription drugs? I'd trade Cuban's accomplishments on that alone for any amount of your whinging.

First let’s see if prices really will come down for patients.

Done and done.

https://costplusdrugs.com

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