LAS VEGAS — Online pharmacy Cost Plus Drugs will be participating in President Donald Trump’s drug price transparency tool, TrumpRx, according to Cost Plus’ founder Mark Cuban.
Cuban shared the news during his keynote at the HLTH conference on Sunday, during which the billionaire entrepreneur and pharmacy disruptor also excoriated the pharmacy benefit manager industry for driving up the cost of U.S. medications.
Trump announced TrumpRx last month, saying the website will allow Americans to shop directly for prescription drugs at discounted rates without insurance. The website, which is set to launch early next year, will not sell or distribute drugs directly. Instead, it will act as a search engine for direct-to-consumer drug websites, according to Cuban.
Cost Plus Drugs, which sells certain prescription medications directly to consumers at cost plus a 15% markup, is sharing access to its application programming interface so that TrumpRx can pull price data, Cuban said.
He hopes displaying prices on TrumpRx will increase Cost Plus Drug’s visibility and customers.
“Because as our volumes go up, our costs go down. And when our costs go down, the price for patients goes down. So for us, it'll be great,” Cuban said.
Cuban added that as of now, the people working on TrumpRx have “been great” and deserving of “all the accolades.”
It’s a warmer analysis than the billionaire’s first read of the program.
Last month, Cuban said TrumpRx deserved a “B” grade in a post on X, writing that — while he admired the team working on the project, including Chris Klomp, the Medicare director at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services — he didn’t believe that pharmacy benefit managers were significantly concerned about disruption from the marketplace.
“Why not an A? The stock prices of PBMs didn't get crushed. Which means, so far, no one expects much change for them,” Cuban wrote.
Reducing the influence of PBMs, powerful middlemen in the pharmaceutical supply chain, has been a focus for Cuban for years, and was a main driver of the billionaire’s decision to found Cost Plus Drugs in 2022.
Cuban blames PBMs in part for America’s high drug prices, arguing the model creates misaligned incentives for pricing by favoring drugs that offer large rebates, rather than those that are most affordable for patients. Cuban has also criticized PBMs for squeezing independent pharmacies through unfair reimbursement and audit practices.
The entrepreneur’s contempt for drug middlemen was once again on display in Las Vegas, where he slammed drug wholesalers and PBMs for “costing everybody hundreds of billions of dollars” and dropped multiple expletives when describing the companies.
