Mark Cuban’s Health-Care Gambit Seeds Influence for Possible 2028 Run

Cuban’s involvement in politics, to date at least, has mostly been a tease. He flirted with running for president in 2016 and 2020, but ultimately endorsed Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. He supported Biden again in 2024, but very much half-heartedly. “If they were having his last wake, and it was him versus Trump, and he was being given his last rites, I would still vote for Joe Biden,” Cuban told Bloomberg News when he visited the White House last year. Like much of what comes out of Cuban’s mouth (and Trump’s), the comment was a bit loopy—but it was apt and memorable.

Cuban, who identifies as an independent, became more involved in the race after Biden dropped out, frequently appearing on cable news as a campaign surrogate for Kamala Harris and even showing up with her at campaign events. At a rally in Wisconsin in October, he referred to Harris’ opponent as “the Trump that stole Christmas” and “the Grinch” because, as Cuban argued, Trump’s proposed tariff policies would make toys and other consumer goods expensive, ruining the holidays. Cuban’s taunt looks prescient, even if it was mostly ignored at the time. He’s annoyed about that, though his main complaint about Harris is more fundamental. “She didn’t know how to sell,” he says. “You have to be relaxed. You have to be open.” Another way of saying this: Harris didn’t act enough like Mark Cuban.

But there are reasons to take what Cuban is doing seriously. Cost Plus sells 2,500 drugs on its website—from asthma inhalers to pills for advanced prostate cancer—using a simple pricing equation. The company takes a 15% markup on what it pays to acquire the drug, plus $5 for dispensing and another $5 for shipping. A 90-count bottle of imatinib, a generic leukemia drug, was recently selling for $34.55 on Cuban’s site. The same amount of the same medication at CVS Caremark—one of the three big pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs—would cost $3,162.19, including $948.66 the patient would have to pay out of pocket, according to an estimate recently quoted to a Bloomberg reporter on the drug plan’s website. Cost Plus doesn’t accept the largest prescription insurance plans, such as Caremark, but for drugs like this it offers big savings even for people paying cash. The PBM industry argues that, examples like this aside, their plans tend to save money for people overall. And yet, that somebody with health insurance would be expected to pay 27 times the price Cuban charges for a generic medication is a source of embarrassment for the insurance industry and proof, in case anyone needed it, of the capacity of the US health-care system to bleed money from those it’s supposed to be helping.

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