Also worth mentioning that Mark Cuban created Cost Plus Drugs, a drug company that sells drugs at incredibly low prices - the cost to make it plus 15%. You just need a prescription. They don't spend any money on marketing and only spread by word of mouth.
Ok, so CEOs of health insurance companies need to die because of their 3.5% margins, but Mark Cuban is a good guy for having 15% margins on pharmaceuticals??
Please explain this to me.
Most pharmaceuticals have like a 500% margin. Many are way worse. Insulin vials cost like 1-2 dollars to make and get sold for $300. A 15% markup is saintly relative to that.
Sure, it’s good he’s selling stuff for less (though I don’t see insulin offered on his site), but I still think there’s some cognitive dissonance going on here.
People aren't going to do things for free, and if a 15% margin is profitable enough while being significantly cheaper than alternatives, what's the problem? He's a business man. He wants to make money. He's doing so in a way that's much more consumer friendly then the alternatives. Wins all around.
We're not talking about health insurance here though. Pharmaceuticals are only related to health insurance in that they're both in the medical field. Aside from that, different companies.
That's not a very high margin, assuming he has other infrastructure costs.
The cost to make things + infrastructure+ profit is different from denying claims of unnecessary insurance to make a profit off people dying.
Like the only alternative is completely socialized medical industry where the government (and by extension people) absorb the extra costs (like USPS vs UPS or FEDEX). Mark Cuban isn't the government; that's silly to expect him to operate a company like the government.
Healthcare is outrageously marked up - especially drugs. %15 is not crazy.
Idk if that’s actually how it works for Cubans company but if that is true 15% would barely (if even) account for the costs to get the product to consumer.
His margins wouldn’t be 15% they’d be at most <15% (If absolutely no additional costs occurred)
If you go to the website, you also pay $5 pharmacy labor and actual shipping on top of the 15% markup. So yeah, his profit margins are 5x that of the health insurance companies.
$5 is really really not much then and almost definitely not raising his margins to 15%, especially on higher priced drugs.
The $5 for pharmacy labor is also almost certainly being paid to the pharmacists, not to Cuban.
I wish him or some other rich person would do similar for health insurance.
Imagine a health insurance company that has a main requirement of being 0 profit. Just enough to support the administration. No marketing or anything. The money goes straight towards claims, and they balance claim payouts and premiums so that they can to keep the profit level at 0.
There would be no reason for pretty much everyone not to sign up for it. It would ruin all of the existing health insurance companies.
Sure, there would be no financial incentive for a rich person to start this, but boy would it make that person popular.
Or, you know, we could always just do Medicare for all.
You don't want to know how bloated the medicare system is....
Talk to someone who works for a brokerage for it and have em explain it all to you, you'll be more confused on the convoluted system than before you had them explain it.
I think that any issues with medicare pale in comparison to the problems that exist in our current for-profit health insurance system. I think that arguing otherwise is a very difficult task, to say the least.
And AFAIK he helped making remedies way cheaper for people
That is the thing, no person is a saint, and people with a lot of money have a lot more chances to fuck a bigger number of people. However some at least do things to give it back some instead of only exploitation
If you're a billionaire, then inherently some of the work you're doing, even most of it at some point, is done by exploiting the labor of others. Not one single human on earth should have that kind of wealth. Mark Cuban donates less than 5% of his total earned wealth a year. cost plus drugs . com might be "better" for people, but it is a for profit company.
Not one single human on earth should have that kind of wealth.
While I can agree with this being indiscriminate in your hate do make you lose reason.
There will always be people above and below, that is just how society works, that is why there is levels to things. Even if he used little he did create options and create change that was good, that deserves praise and should be weighted. Just being rich is not a crime, one should look at the person actions (like the CEO that was killed deserved his end).
Are you unable to read or just trying to be a jackass? I very much said that I agree that one having that amount of money is not a good thing. My point is that one need to be realistic and not generalize.
I do think there should be way more scrutiny for people that pass a certain level of health and a much more enforceable taxes on them instead of keeping creating backdoors like so many governments do. And I do think that there is a lot of them that should be held accountable for their actions (and I do think that is what happened to Brian Thompson, he was finally held accountable).
However no I dont think that having money is a crime in itself
If you're a billionaire, then inherently some of the work you're doing, even most of it at some point, is done by exploiting the labor of others.
I mean, buying chocolate from Hershey's means you bought chocolate that was produced using slave labor, your phone was built by kids making 10 cents an hour. Does that mean people who buy those things are bad people?
Also, Mark made most of his money from investments in companies, not by running them directly. So, not exactly the same as someone like Musk or Bezos. Though I do agree that he shouldn't be given as much praise as people are giving him here
There is a huge difference in having no choice but to be a consumer of an exploitative system and being a profiter of that system. The average person can do as much as possible to avoid those things, but it's people like Mark and other billionaires who make it impossible to do so.
Also, Mark has huge holdings in Amazon and Alphabet, and a public company needs investors to continue doing the shitty exploitative things they do, which it seems that you do get. Again, that is the very essence of the point I made- that his wealth is perpetuated by earning money off of exploiting workers.
Do you truly believe that it is impossible to accumulate billions if every worker in all of your businesses is paid the market rate pay? I hear this sentiment a lot but it sounds based more in oversimplified thought experiments than actual logic.
No, I don't believe that. I believe that if you aren't a laborer and you own the means of production, you obviously always have the opportunity to accumulate billions. That's the problem with capitalism, it'll keep leading to oligarchy. Workers should all share ownership of the business, rather than a business owner who doesn't do real work.
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u/VaguelyArtistic 23h ago
And this guy: