Rick Bates has a nice business finding consumers the best deals on their medicines. But now billionaire Mark Cuban is elbowing in.
By William Baldwin, Senior Contributor
Drug prices are insane.
A prescription for an attention deficit treatment that costs $106 if you say you don’t have insurance has an out-of-pocket cost of $326 if you use the insurance. A month’s supply of a prostate cancer drug shows up at $123 in some stores but at discounter Costco has a price tag of $2,548. A lifesaving leukemia treatment is $68 a month at Walgreens but has an $8,203 price posted at Rite Aid.
Coming to the rescue of the confused and the overcharged: Richard Bates, founder and chief executive of RxSense. This Boston-headquartered firm is in the business of providing price transparency in pharmaceuticals. Last year, it says, it saved 11 million patients an average $76 per script by steering them to low prices. For its business clients it provides intel on a chaotic marketplace, gathering 35 million data points a day on wholesale and retail pricing.
RxSense’s original product, called SingleCare, works as a sort of Groupon for prescriptions. Type in a drug name and see if there’s a discount coupon good at a pharmacy near you. If the number is lower than what you’d pay using your insurance, you toss the insurance and pay from your wallet.
Consider lisdexamfetamine, the attention disorder drug. Suppose you are in a Medicare Part D insurance plan sold by Centene and administered by Express Scripts. You would be asked to pay $326 for a 30-day supply of 50-milligram capsules at CVS. But if you tell CVS that you’ll skip the insurance and want the SingleCare price, you pay only $106, with CVS handing an undisclosed referral fee to RxSense.
If you grab the low price, you will be punished for price shopping; the $326 counts toward an annual deductible but the $106 doesn’t. And if you pay the steep price, you will be left wondering who’s pocketing the extra $220. Centene, perhaps? CVS? Maybe Express Scripts, which is a “pharmacy benefit manager.” PBMs are ostensibly in business to negotiate great prices on behalf of patients and employers, but transparency is low in their part of the business.
RxSense is in a treacherous line of work. Its main competitor in drug coupons, GoodRx, has struggled to make a profit and its shares trade at 87% off their high. Bates says that it took $20 million of his and two outsiders’ money to get the privately held RxSense off the ground and that he was personally on the hook for debt incurred in the early years. “I have a high appetite for risk,” he says.
Bates, 54, started the firm in 2015, after a career as a health insurance exec ending with the presidency of a PBM. The gamble seems to have paid off. RxSense doesn’t disclose revenue or net income, but Bates says that, not counting one quarter when the firm incurred expenses raising equity money in the venture capital market, it has been consistently in the black for five years.
GoodRx and RxSense now have a new competitive threat: Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company. With this two-year-old outfit the billionaire aims to cut out all the middlemen—coupon dispensers, insurers and PBMs—by selling directly to consumers who either don’t have insurance or have such high deductibles that they’re better off without the insurance. Amazon is also getting into the act with deals on generic drugs.
In the current free-for-all of drug pricing, the insurance companies don’t cover themselves with glory. Try looking for the generic version of the leukemia drug Gleevec while using that Centene insurance for Part D. You will be informed that a 30-day supply of 400-milligram tablets is priced at $3,000 but because you are covered you only have to pay $1,159. Some bargain. Using a SingleCare coupon, you can get it for $68 at Walgreens. Mark Cuban will mail it to you for $41.
Express Scripts is owned by Cigna, an insurance company. It’s one of the three giants in the PBM industry, the other two being the property of UnitedHealthcare, another insurer, and CVS, both an insurer and a drug retailer. Conflicting roles, it seems. (CVS says, in reference to buying lisdexamfetamine with insurance, that the price in this situation is dictated by Express Scripts, but declines to say who gets the extra $220. Centene, Costco and Rite Aid did not respond to questions about drug pricing.)
Cuban has no patience for any of the PBMs. “Either you work with the big three PBMs or you don’t. We don’t,” he says in an emailed response to questions. He adds: “We don’t make you run from pharmacy to different pharmacy to chase their best price.”
How has Bates handled this competition? By diversifying. The consumer-facing work is down to 30% of his revenue, the rest coming from software and data that help health-related companies run their businesses. He’s arming all the combatants on the battlefield: pharmacies, small PBMs, small coupon distributors, large employers self-insuring their work forces. Cuban Cost Plus is one of his clients.
“We try to be Switzerland,” Bates says. “I think Mark Cuban’s business is here to stay.” He has no unkind words for the PBMs, either: “They create tremendous value for the vast majority of their customers.”
PBMs create value? That’s a surprise, given the bizarre price discrepancies that drive RxSense’s original line of work. But Bates points out that the most expensive 1% of drug prescriptions account for half of drug spending. These are medicines, like Wegovy for weight loss and Lantus for controlled-release insulin, still under patent. It is entirely rational for manufacturers to attempt to recover their billion-dollar development costs by charging whatever they can extract from anxious patients, and helpful to have PBMs haggling on behalf of those patients.
Pharmaceutical retailing is evolving rapidly. Soon enough, Bates predicts, insurance won’t apply to off-patent medicines; you’ll shop for them the way you shop for aspirin, and ever more of the volume will move to mail order.
At the same time, the health marketplace will get more complicated. Bates has 200 employees, somewhat more than half his staff, in technical roles, including two Ph.D.s in artificial intelligence. “A significant part of what we deliver today is data management and business intelligence,” he says. There’s growth there, even if there isn’t much in drug retailing.
