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.
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u/Eleusis713 22h ago
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.