Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs and Humana are exploring a potential partnership to help lower the cost of prescription drugs for employers.
Cuban, an entrepreneur, businessman and TV personality who co-founded Cost Plus Drugs, said the company is in discussions with Humana to work with its CenterWell healthcare services business to provide a better pharmacy experience for consumers and a direct-to-employer model for prescription drugs.
Launched in January 2022, Cost Plus Drug Company works directly with drug manufacturers to bypass middlemen and lower prices. For consumers, the price of each drug includes a 15% markup as a profit margin and a $5 shipping fee. Cost Plus also transparently displays what it pays for its medicines. The company now carries over 2,500 medications.
“We need to partner with folks that extend our access so that we can support more consumers,” Cuban told Forbes Senior Healthcare Contributor Bruce Japsen during the 2025 Forbes Healthcare Summit on Thursday.
“We have a great relationship with a health plan who helps us there, but we’re talking with CenterWell because they do such a great job of it, and so they’re able to give us access and potentially partner. We’re still working on things so that we can partner with them and bring volume to them, or they can bring volume to us for consumers,” Cuban said while on a panel with Humana CEO Jim Rechtin.
Cuban said he sees a big opportunity in the direct-to-employer market. “As much as consumers look for the lowest price, you have to be in a high deductible plan or not have insurance in order to typically go by directly, whereas, you know, 160-plus million people are getting their insurance through private or public employers,” he said, adding, “Those employers don’t like the bigger PBMs [pharmacy benefit managers] any more than anybody else does, and they’re getting ripped off by them.”
Cost Plus Drugs is exploring partnerships with healthcare companies like CenterWell to “go directly to employers,” Cuban said.
“I sit with the CEO and I say, ‘Look, you are getting ripped off by your PBM. And I understand it’s difficult to just move, but there are a growing number of direct-to-employer programs that are being created. Let me tell you about them.’ And we’re working on those types of programs with CenterWell and the manufacturers,” the Shark Tank star said Thursday.
Humana’s CenterWell is a large and growing healthcare services arm that provides primary care, home health and pharmacy services. CenterWell’s specialty pharmacy business is seeing strong volume growth.
Humana is focused on being a “consumer healthcare company,” Rechtin said during the Forbes Healthcare Summit.
“Figuring out what the consumer needs, working backwards, figuring out how to deliver against that. We are known as a insurance company but if we’re going to deliver against consumer needs, we need to be in spots in the delivery system that can really impact the access, quality and ultimately, the cost of healthcare. And that’s what CenterWell is all about, and pharmacy is a good example,” Rechtin said. “With pharmacy, we basically looked at the traditional model, and we are not getting the cost efficiency, the affordability that we need to make sure that our members are getting access to medications the way they need to get access to medications. So, we built a pharmacy to try to correct that.”
Earlier this year, Humana’s CenterWell signaled it was extending beyond its traditional home-delivery pharmacy into direct-to-patient specialty pharmacy to fulfill orders for GLP-1 weight loss medications. Back in April, Novo Nordisk disclosed that Humana’s CenterWell would be its fulfillment partner for NovoCare Pharmacy, the company’s direct-to-patient delivery option for cash-paying patients.
“We realized we’ve actually got a pretty good asset here that is really good at getting medications from the manufacturer, from the plant to the consumer quickly, efficiently and effectively,” Rechtin said. “That’s good for healthcare. It’s good for cost. How do we do more of it? The ‘more’ was looking at, how do we give access to more Americans? And the way you do that is by creating models that can go either direct-to-consumer or direct-to-employers that go around the old model. And that’s what we’re trying to do right now with our pharmacy.”
For its direct-to-consumer offering, CenterWell is contracting directly with the drug manufacturers, he noted. “The consumer is coming directly to us. They’re seeing the face value of the cost of the drug. There’s not layer upon layer upon layer of other players in that value chain. We have partners, but you’re basically streamlining how that medication gets, again, from the plant to the consumer, and then the consumer is seeing a net price. They’re seeing the actual price of the drug, which is much less than what you would typically see in the normal system. It allows us to basically give access at a lower cost,” Rechtin stated.
Cuban has publicly chided employers to demand transparency and pay cash for prescription drugs, encouraging them to help shake up the traditional pharmacy business model.
Rechtin echoed those calls for more employers to push back on the traditional PBM models.
“We need more CEOs of large employers to basically say, ‘Hey, we’re going to demand a different model, one that is transparent, one that bypasses the system that’s been in place now for decades.’ And look, there are alternatives, but those alternatives can’t be fully built without the demand that we need from employers, and that really is going to require CEOs to step into the benefit process,” he said.
Direct-to-employer programs could save members “billions and billions of dollars across employers,” Cuban asserted.
“If you look at how the system operates end to end, and you think about all the different players and all the different systems — we have the manufacturer, we have a hub, we have a PBM, we have a distributor, we have a pharmacy. The question is, how much value is being added at each of those steps? And then how much does it cost? And do you really need all of that cost? Is it really all adding value?” Rechtin said.
He argued that a direct-to-employer model, and a potential partnership with Cost Plus Drugs, would simplify and streamline the pharmacy service.
“We have this challenge in healthcare in general. We have layered complexity upon complexity upon complexity to the things that we do,” he said. “What we’re trying to do is we’re trying to take a very simple product that has been manufactured in a plant somewhere, and we are trying to get that to an individual who needs it for their health. What we’re attempting to do is step back and say, ‘OK, how do you get rid of all that complexity? Simplify this, streamline it, and just do the basics of what’s meant to be done here, get a drug from the plant to the consumer, and do it in the most efficient way possible’.”
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