Promptly after President Trump’s November 5 victory, business mogul Mark Cuban deleted all his pro-Kamala Harris posts on X (formerly Twitter) — an odd move for a former top campaign surrogate to make. What he cannot delete, however, is his track record of trying to use Harris to regulate his company’s competition away. In fact, he’s escalating his anti-free-market strategy.
Cuban participated late last month in a fireside chat at the University of Pennsylvania to explain why he wants the government to regulate pharmacy benefit managers, the companies that businesses (small and large) contract with to negotiate lower drug purchase price costs with Big Pharma.
Mark Cuban should follow the rest of Wall Street’s lead, cut his losses, and move on.
Kamala Harris’ willingness to take them on appears to have factored considerably into his decision to support her as aggressively as he did. Soon after Cuban talked to Harris about PBMs, her campaign came out with a plan against them. Cuban then began stumping for the Democratic candidate in the battleground states of Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
But PBMs should not be regulated — nor should they be demonized. If they were so bad, businesses would not voluntarily pay them to lower their prescription drug costs. They continue to hire PBMs because they make things more affordable — lowering Medicare Part D spending by 20%, for example.
The true price gougers aren’t PBMs. Drug companies are responsible for 65% of the total list price of our prescriptions, and their relationships with Washington decision-makers have enabled them to raise prices above free-market levels. Mark Cuban’s company, Cost Plus Drugs, also negotiates drug prices as PBMs do, so he would benefit if the government squelches PBMs. In other words, he parrots Big Pharma’s talking points on who to blame because an anti-free-market outcome would help him personally.
That’s the problem with Cuban. He relies on political gamesmanship instead of free-market ingenuity to succeed.
While he astutely made a lot of money on dot-com businesses in the internet’s infancy, more recently, he has accrued net losses on all his “Shark Tank” deals. Working with Harris and other government officials to wipe PBMs out of the marketplace would ensure that Cost Plus Drugs has a better future than his “Shark Tank” investments — but it would come at the expense of affordable drugs for millions of Americans.
That is disturbing when, according to the American Hospital Association:
Nearly 30% of Americans say they haven’t taken their medication as prescribed due to high drug prices, and it is estimated that more than 1.1 million Medicare patients alone could die over the next decade because they cannot afford to pay for their prescribed medications.
If Cuban wants to wipe his support for Harris off the internet, congratulate President Trump, and move on, that’s fine — but he should be doing the same with his failed attempt to push self-serving regulations through the White House, too. Instead, he’s amping up his efforts, and that’s in no one’s interest but his own.
Trump won’t repeat Harris’ mistake. His inner circle knows what’s at stake if Cuban achieves his political agenda and won’t let it happen. Neither will Congress. Although some lawmakers are pushing anti-PBM regulatory bills before the session ends, Trump loyalists like Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) are prepared to block them.
Pharma’s stock shares have dropped precipitously since Trump’s re-election, signaling that many investors already know this cold, hard truth.
Rather than continuing with his self-serving regulatory push, Mark Cuban should follow the rest of Wall Street’s lead, cut his losses, and move on. Maybe even focus on genuine free-market competition rather than legislative bullying. It would be better for all of us.
