The US is kind of unique in a lot of its healthcare dysfunctions and there are a lot of individual policies that might help.
For example, one thing most other developed countries do is have a central state agency negotiate prices for drugs for the whole country at once, which exerts a lot of buying power to drive costs down.
The idea of Medicare in the US doing that has been proposed several times, but has been blocked, most famously during the initial ObamaCare debate.
The stated reason for blocking that is that decreasing reimbursements would decrease the profit motive for pharma companies to innovate and create new drugs. The more practical reason is.... probably just that lobbyists exist.
But that is just one policy among many. We are simple folk here at the MCCPDC, we just charge less. :-)
Well, there's some technical measures we've taken and some practical ones to ensure we work to be profitable but remain focused primarily on improving public health and helping patients.
On the technical level, we incorporated as a public benefit corporation, so we are judged not only on how profitable we are for shareholders, but how well be maintain our social mission. That is actually in our charter documents and is a legal requirement.
On a practical level, Mark Cuban is our lead investor and his interest is very much focused on helping people and fixing system issues in healthcare. We also did some screening to ensure our other investors are socially minded and prioritize social benefit as well as profits.
My mindset is that we need to be profitable to be sustainable and grow enough to help the overall system, but we won't be extortionate.
Short answer... it's complicated. And it's intentionally complicated to make it difficult for people to understand how they are getting ripped off on the price of drugs and by who.
It will be a sterile fill-finish facility. The facility will fill vials of sterile injectable medicine. Those tend to be the drugs which are most affected by shortages and price gouging overall. The facility will just do finished drug products.
Our initial drugs are supplied on "private label" arrangements where other companies actually do the manufacturing, and we just add our labels and our own NDC code so we can set the price. Since we don't go through middlemen, that price can often times be a lot lower.
We'll have to source API (active pharmaceutical ingredients) elsewhere for now. At some point, would like to completely internalize our supply chain, but one step at a time. :-)
Ideally yeah, would be good if we didn't need to exist. There are a variety of policy initiatives the US could likely implement to bring costs down. My kind of mindset with the company though is I am a nobody from nowhere, and congress isn't going to listen to me. I can make cheap / sell medicine at an affordable price though. So I will do that.
I'm not sure drug importation will work though, not because it's a bad policy per se, but I'm not sure that other countries will let the US import their low-cost medicines if US law changes in order to protect their domestic supplies.
There's Canada as an example case. We have ~10x the population of Canada, and California alone could use up all of Canada's medicines. Not sure Canada would go for it.
Think it's worth a shot though. I know there are some trial programs going into place in Colorado and Florida around allowing drug importation. Will be cool to follow and see how they play out.
Currently our frontend is react, backend node.js, and a MySQL database with a graphql API (edit).
Would be looking for folks to help make a more robust consumer facing site as we add products and different types of customers.
We've been focusing mostly on filling roles for the sterile fill-finish facility we are constructing in Dallas (QA, formulation specialists, etc.) and have put building out the dev team for the web sit kind of on the backburner with me just kind of personally managing it at the moment.
Hi guys, Alex Oshmyansky here, CEO of the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company. Crazy to see our little project at the top of Hacker News!
We're planning to introduce a lot more drugs with transparent prices later this year, cutting out monopolistic middlemen in the supply chain and alleviating pharma drug shortages, particularly for rare and orphan disease conditions.
We are looking for a few devs (fullstack, frontend, and backend). If anybody is interested, drop me a line at [email protected]
In the meantime, happy to answer questions if anyone is interested!