Brandi Glanville is turning to Mark Cuban’s pharmacy company as she looks for help lowering the cost of her medication, with healthcare consultant Rachel Strauss saying she has been working with the reality TV personality on the bills she faces now and the ones ahead. Strauss, the CEO of PBM Princess, LLC, said she is using Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs to compare what Glanville has been charged with what the same medicines cost there.
Cuban said CostPlusDrugs.com is the only truly transparent pricing pharmacy and that its prices do not change by city, state or date. He said the site shows its actual cost when a medication is searched, then adds a 15 percent markup and a $5 shipping fee. He said the company was created because he wanted to change healthcare and the price of medications, and that a drug can sell for $20 at one pharmacy and $500 at another because of greed.
For Glanville, the issue is not abstract. In February, she said on her I Do, Part 2 podcast that she had spent $200,000 trying to figure out what was causing her facial disfigurement and had visited 21 doctors. She said she had been feeling sick for about three years, with symptoms including brain fog, joint pain and facial disfigurement, and said that even with insurance, “Kaiser, let’s just say — sucks.”
Strauss said she and Glanville went through every medication line by line and found sharp swings in the cost of the same drug from one month to the next. She said some of Glanville’s medicines were priced at $29 to $30, while the same drugs were $6 to $8 on Cost Plus, and that many were more than 75 percent less there. Strauss said she was able “in one click” to find medications priced more than 75% less at Cost Plus, and said her team is now working with the pharmacy to see what money may be owed back to Glanville.
The case underscores why Cuban’s pharmacy model has become a talking point far beyond one celebrity’s medical bills. Strauss said the price gaps were so large that if Glanville had gone to Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus, there could have been a 70 to 80 percent difference. Cuban said CostPlusDrugs.com is still the only pharmacy that publishes a price list and charges everyone the same price for a medication, a claim aimed squarely at a system where the same prescription can cost wildly different amounts depending on where it is filled.
For Glanville, the immediate next step is a financial one: figuring out what can be recovered and what she no longer has to pay going forward. For Cost Plus, the story is another public test of whether a mark cuban pharmacy can do what it promises — make drug pricing simple enough that patients can finally see the numbers before they are trapped by them.