Why Drug Pricing Transparency Is Finally Disrupting Big Pharma's Stranglehold with Erin Albert

Michael welcomes Erin Albert, Chief of Pharmacy Relations, Network and Professional Affairs at Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs, to explain why U.S. drug pricing is so opaque and how transparency can lower costs. Albert shares how she joined the company after publishing LinkedIn price comparisons sparked by imatinib pricing, and describes her background as a pharmacist and attorney. She breaks down how pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) evolved from claims processing into powerful middlemen, driving costs through rebates tied to formulary placement and “spread” pricing, especially on generics. The conversation covers vertical integration, state policy efforts, employer incentives that favor bundled solutions, pharmacy closures and “pharmacy deserts,” and why education should include “following the money.” Albert outlines Cost Plus’s cost-plus math, fair dispensing fees, and options for consumers via CostPlusDrugs.com, TeamCubanCard.com, and CostPlusWellness.com, urging patients to shop cash prices versus insurance copays.


Timestamps:
00:24  Welcome and Setup
01:31  Erin Albert Origin Story
04:49  How Pharmacy Pricing Works
08:28  Transparency and PBM Tactics
11:09  Policy and Vertical Integration
16:47  Building a Fair Pharmacy Network
20:40  Education and Medical Benefit Markups
24:05  Pharmacists as Clinicians
27:58  Trends and Sustainable Pricing
29:35  How Consumers Take Power Back
31:29  Key Takeaways and Resources
33:38  Closing

Connect with Erin:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/erinalbert/
https://linktr.ee/erinalbert
https://www.markcubancostplusdrugcompany.com
https://www.costplusdrugs.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Top Voice Podcast, where each week I sit down with leading voices in business, leadership, and transformation to unpack the issues that matter most. Together, we explore fresh insights, bold ideas, and real-world stories from people shaping how we think about change, culture, and what's possible. Hello and welcome to the Top Voice podcast. It is June 23rd, officially summer, and I'm excited to have on with us Aaron Albert. Aaron and I have been preparing for this conversation for quite a while, and we were talking right before the show started about how unique this conversation we're about to have is and how unique you are as a as the I'm going to let you do your title, but we're going to talk about drug pricing and the pharmacy network and some of the secrets behind one of the biggest issues, if not the biggest issue facing most Americans, which is healthcare, healthcare costs, and in this case, uh pharmacy drugs, drug pricing. It's been all over the news. Before we do that, Aaron, I give you a chance to tell your story a little bit because it's a good one. Uh for those of you listening on the live broadcast, please do leave us a question or a comment. Let us know where you're tuning in from. We'd love to take those. It's a great way to uh to add to the conversation. And for those of you who are listening on your favorite podcast platform, if you have not yet, please do subscribe. It's the best way to support the show. Uh Aaron, let's jump in first. I your story's so great. How did you become part of Mark Cuban's Cos Plus Drugs? And how did you get to where you are and tell us about what you do?

SPEAKER_02 1:36

Well, thank you, Michael, for the opportunity to be with you today. I love restreaming. It's been a hot minute, though, since I've restreamed on LinkedIn. So this is uh fun. My official title at Cost Plus Drugs is Chief of Pharmacy Relations Network and Professional Affairs. However, how I got my job here was actually doing a pretty decent job at my former employer at Apex Benefits, right here in Indianapolis, Indiana, where I'm located. I reached out to Mark Cuban uh because of their amatinib pricing. And amatnib is a drug that's used for chemotherapy. And at the time when I was at Apex Benefits, uh, the brand manufacturer was pulling its coupons, and we were kind of panicking for the patients that were on that chemotherapy. They really needed an option to find a more affordable amatnib. And one of the first drugs that costlessdrugs.com, uh, which is our first website, was uh amatnib that they featured and they had a really amazing price on it. So I started publishing and comparing prices across the industry actually on LinkedIn of all places while I was still at Apex. And lo and behold, one day I logged into LinkedIn, still at Apex, and Mr. Cuban was on a LinkedIn live with the head of news at LinkedIn, and they were showing my price tables from posts that I had actually posted on LinkedIn, comparing their prices to other sources. So our chief of growth, Ron Harrison, actually then reached out to me and uh he wanted to talk. And he had mentioned that our CEO, Alex Oshmiansky, was looking for a pharmacist attorney to join the team. And would I be interested in a job? And I said, you know, do you have a job description? No. And lo and behold, here we are, four years uh away from that now. I've had, I think, four different titles since I've been here. But every time an opportunity, I've had the chance to write my own job description, which has been a huge, exciting opportunity for me because in my own career coaching over the course of my career, I've always taught students that they need to write their own dream job description. So full circle moment, uh, here I am.

SPEAKER_00 3:56

I I love it. I said to you before the show that the best jobs never come with a job description. They're the jobs that that you create. And and clearly in a space that's that's quite niche and quite specific. Now, you're a pharmacist by background and an attorney. Is that what I understand?

SPEAKER_02 4:11

Yes, I'm a pharmd. Uh, I also had a BS in pharmacy. So I went to pharmacy school twice because I'm a little slow. And then I went to business school and got an MBA in marketing, and then I went to law school later in my career.

SPEAKER_00 4:24

Amazing. Amazing. So you mentioned as we got started that you wanted to do some education for people. And I think this is a conversation we don't we haven't talked about healthcare enough on this show. We talk a lot about AI, we were saying that, but we but we need to. It it's it's one of the biggest issues. It continues to be one of the biggest issues around. Uh, so maybe we'll let's start with some education. For those people who don't understand the way pharmacies work, most people just go pick up their drug, then they wait at the window, and then somebody fills it and there's a cost, and it depends on if you have insurance or not, and all that stuff. But but how does the system work historically? And what are you all doing at Cost Plus Drugs to disrupt that?

SPEAKER_02 5:08

Sure. So over the course of my own career, which is several decades now, I won't say how many, um, we started in the pharmacy barely at its infancy with claims processing, which a lot of people aren't aware in pharmacy, the benefits are adjudicated or processed real time. That is unusual for healthcare because most of medical side benefits take months to process claims. Whereas with pharmacy, it takes seconds. Um and over the course of time, claims processing has crept in to the point where claims processors who initially just process claims became what we call today as pharmacy benefit managers, many of them. And pharmacy benefit managers have crept into a lot of different arenas within pharmacy benefits. So when you get that little benefits card from your employer, there's a whole bunch of electronic rules. There's a what they call a drug formulary, there are tiers of preferred drugs. All of this is put together by pharmacy benefit managers that work for either the federal government for plans andor self-funded employers or fully insured employers. So pharmacy benefit managers are the folks in kind of the middle. They call them the middleman, if you will, for pharmacy benefits. Um, we are not a pharmacy benefit manager, and I think that's a really important distinction, even though that's a vehicle of state law, and every state has a different legal definition of what a PDM is. But just know that these operators are behind the scenes. And you know, back in the day, you take a physical prescription into your pharmacy, right? Well, a lot of that has changed. In fact, a lot of state laws have now have mandated that some, if not all, prescriptions need to move electronically from your provider over to the pharmacy. And what's happening behind the scenes before that prescription even reaches the pharmacy is staggeringly different than when I first started in the industry. And there's a lot of things happening behind the scenes that most pharmacists don't even honestly know that is going on. So just for that prescription to go from your doctor's office to the pharmacy sometimes is a huge uh undertaking that a lot of people don't appreciate how complicated it's become.

SPEAKER_00 7:44

Yeah. And we're gonna talk about cost in a minute because I I'm curious about where I think most people don't understand because they don't understand it, they just know that drug prices are high. And I think the easiest answer for most people is pharmacy or you know, big pharma is got patents on certain drugs and they raise the price because of supply and demand, and they gouge you for whatever you're looking for. But I know that's probably a drastic oversimplification. What what are you all doing to sort of disintermediate or disrupt the current system and what's causing the current system to be so expensive?

SPEAKER_02 8:23

I think in one word, it's transparency, Michael. So what we're trying to do with our disruption is provide transparency. We always on a costplusdrugs.com or teamcubancard.com, where our uh community retail network is, we always show our math. We have an actual acquisition cost of the drug, not some fuzzy index that, you know, is an industry standard, but nobody actually pays all the way to our transparent markup of 15%, plus in the case of the network, a dispensing fee and a claims processing fee. And that's it. We show all of our math and we show our prices. Uh it's very rare to find all the drugs available at a pharmacy solution that list out all the prices. You'll see, you know, $4 drug lists, for example, but they don't include all the drugs. And the cost plus model, to be clear, is not a revolution. This is not something that just came out of, you know, Mr. Cuban's head or Alex Oshmiansky's head. This was a model that they used when I was first a community practice pharmacy straight out of school. We used the cost plus model. How it got complex and confusing and opaque is when the PBM started taking over and taking away more services, but they in turn were also charging manufacturers uh for the privilege of being higher on that pharmacy formulary, those tiers, like a tier one drug. If you want to be a tier one drug, if you want to be first in line, you have to pay higher what they call drug rebates. And rebates are just as they sound. Uh, they pay those rebates back to the PBM, and then the PBM in many cases calls it something else and retains part of it or most of it. Um, the other challenge is spread. And spread is a term that where the PBM charges one rate to the employer and then pays the pharmacy at a lower rate and keeps that difference. And that difference is called spread. And spread has happened a lot on generics because there's typically not drug rebates on generics. So where they make their money on generics, 90% of which all prescriptions in this US USA are generics, they keep the spread. So between rebates and spread, that's driven up the cost of prescription drugs.

SPEAKER_00 10:55

Wow. Uh uh it's fascinating. The things that the things that you learn that you don't know about how the system works. I I have two questions and maybe starting with a comment. The the the president has been quoted famously for talking about drug prices, and people get a lot of traction out of that, and it seems to be a priority out of the administration. But when when that conversation comes up, they they tend to talk about the drug companies, not this middle layer of the of the experience. How how is that middle layer from a policy perspective getting addressed? Because it sort of seems the way you describe it to the uneducated, which I'm gonna put myself in this category hearing it for the first time, it it feels a bit like a free-for-all that this just crept in and they got the ability to make markups, create incentives, rebates, all of these things. Where has the policy infrastructure been for this layer of the pharmacy network?

SPEAKER_02 11:52

Well, it's a really interesting time in pharmacy because pharmacy practice is regulated under state law, police powers. Okay. So states individually are starting to tackle this issue with disintermediating what we call vertical integration. So the larger PBMs and medical carriers, they have this vertical where they own the medical carrier, they own the pharmacy benefit manager, maybe they own the labs, maybe they own the physician practices. And when you have that vertical integration, you make it, well, first of all, you sell it very easily to the employers as, oh, you just have one solution. It's super easy. Right. But you can manipulate things when you own the whole vertical. So it's interesting. Some states, like the state of Tennessee, recently just passed a law where you cannot be both a pharmacy and have a PBM within the state, just as one example. And while I commend the states for trying to police that for lack of a better term, I don't mean to play Glinda the Goodwitch here, but we have the power all along to just stop doing business with those big vertically integrated companies that are making billions and billions of dollars for their shareholders on the backs of employees that are just trying to get healthcare and their employers who are trying to do the right thing for their employees.

SPEAKER_01 13:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 13:25

So I don't know that government is going to be able to regulate its way out of this issue. But the good news is we all, as planned fiduciaries, as heads of HR, as CEOs, as CFOs of the company, have the option and the opportunity to just choose somebody else that is more transparent.

SPEAKER_00 13:48

So that leads to the other question. You kind of walked into the question I was going to ask, which is you all are bringing transparency to the process of drug pricing, which seems like a no-brainer and seems like an easy sell to pharmacies and medical providers and employers that are trying to, I don't know, for lack of a better phrase, do do the right thing. What what's why why does someone choose to not go the path of more transparent pricing?

SPEAKER_02 14:19

Because they choose the path of least resistance, as I previously mentioned. If you go to one large vertically integrated carrier, they're going to give you rebate fee credits on medical benefits, which those premiums are the most expensive part of the medical benefit, right? So they already know what a company's or or what their employees are using in terms of drug rebates. So they'll apply part of that as a rebate fee credit on the medical benefit and say, hey, if you go with us in our vertically integrated solution, we're going to cut back your medical premiums. How about that? And nine out of 10 are going to say, okay, this is a no-brainer, right? Back to your phrase no-brainer. Why would we take the time and expense and not have the expertise, by the way, to carve out pharmacy benefits from, for example, from the medical benefit? It's much more complicated. And then, you know, that that traditional medical carrier is still going to come back and say, hey, we're going to charge you because we still have to integrate the pharmacy benefits into that particular member's out-of-pocket totals and deductible totals. And we've got work to do there. So we're going to charge you for that as well. To the point where employers just throw up their hands and say, let's just do the easiest thing. Let's do the path of least resistance. And they go and renew over and over again with this the big three carriers.

SPEAKER_00 15:44

Yeah. I I think you're the only person in on earth that understands this. Just your ability, you're clearly good at your job, and my head is spinning understanding this. And I have a I have, again, two questions that I'm going to save one for later about people and where how how do we get some of the power back as as consumers? But before I do that, um at what rate are you having success making people kind of come to the other side and starting to break apart? I mean, you're obviously a business, you're obviously trying to uh add value and and make money, but do it with a certain business model. How is that going for you all? And what barriers do you face as you're trying to disrupt this pattern and and kind of get, I don't know, I this is maybe too pejorative, but getting pharmacies over to the good side, is that does that feel better to me?

SPEAKER_02 16:35

That's what it sounds like a Star Wars episode.

SPEAKER_00 16:37

Everything's Star Wars, everything is Star Wars, but Gen X, we're all Star Wars, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:43

Um, it's been an interesting ride. So, in three of the four years that I've been here at Cost Plus, my primary focus has been on building our pharmacy network. And my passion, my principal job when I got out to school, I was gonna be a pharmacist in charge at Kroger Pharmacy in Plymouth, Indiana for 30 years. That was it. That was all I was gonna do. So my heart still lies in the value of community practice pharmacy. So when Mr. Cuban approached me after my first year at Cospla S almost, he said, Hey, let's go build a network. And I said, I'd be happy to do that for you, Mr. Cuban. The only challenge associated with that is we have to make sure that we are not putting pharmacies in our network underwater on their claims and closing their doors. Because the bigger PBMs are doing that. They're reimbursing pharmacies less than the cost of the drug that the pharmacy paid for that drug. So, with that, we created Costplus Drugs Marketplace. So now it's this eight, I'm an 80s kid again, shopping mall opportunity where pharmacies can go into our shopping mall and buy from different distributors, and we set our actual acquisition costs on those drugs based upon the best price in the shopping mall at cost plus drugs marketplace. So we are trying to we and I know you had a question about this, our vertical has become kind of forced upon us because we have to disintermediate each parts of that supply chain. And so there's a big talk in pharmacy now about pharmacy deserts, pharmacies closing their doors, one in three has closed their doors in the last few years. And that creates what I think is a public health crisis, which is a matter of national security, in my own opinion. And I'm glad Trump Rx exists, and I'm glad the Trump administration is looking at this because it is a matter of national security that if you have or live in a rural town and your one pharmacy closes its doors and you got to drive 45 minutes to another pharmacy to get a vaccine or an antibiotic for your two-year-old, how are you gonna do that if you don't have a car or you know, you work full-time or all the things? So all of that is happening behind the scenes. And so we're trying to make sure that every step within the vertical of pharmacy distribution is taken care of, not only for our patients ultimately and our members, but also for the pharmacies themselves that are in our network because we don't want to force more pharmacies to close their doors.

SPEAKER_00 19:24

Yeah, I I didn't realize the rate was that was that high in terms of, and and I have a couple of college uh teammates of mine that that got into the pharmacy business. I graduated in '95, so it's been a while, but and I, you know, a lot of many things have changed. And I guess I didn't realize that this pharmacy network is in many ways its own independent network of people running small businesses, it sounds like, that are trying to now contend with the pressures from above and and from below. Let's talk about the medical providers for a second. And I know that there's those that are trying to be more vertically integrated, but I don't know. Maybe the maybe the question is how how did they sort of let this happen in the sense it feels like there was scope creep in the network that just evolved. Was this just, I don't know, a problem that didn't seem to be a problem until it was one? Is this something that accumulated over time? I'm again I'm just curious how this sort of evolved from the medical provider perspective.

SPEAKER_02 20:26

Well, the Death Star wasn't built overnight, right?

SPEAKER_00 20:29

Star Wars is probably the best Star Wars episode of the world.

SPEAKER_02 20:32

Yes. Um, it it's a matter of a lot of different things. Uh I'll I'll pick on pharmacy as a provider because I do think pharmacists are a provider, although we're not under the Social Security Act, but that's another battle. Anyway, um, one of the the notions around that is that um in pharmacy schools, and yes, I taught in a school of pharmacy for over a decade, so I get to criticize pharmacy schools. Pharmacy schools do not focus on following the money, they focus on following the patient and the clinician, the clinician, um, patient dynamic, making sure the therapeutic is appropriate. However, if you're suggesting a gene therapy that costs five million dollars for a patient and they cannot afford it, end of conversation, it doesn't matter. And so I can't speak for the medical profession because I've not taught in a school of medicine. But I can tell you one of my chief criticisms of pharmacy schools is they have not taught following the money. They don't talk about how prices are benchmarked, they don't talk about how they're flawed, they don't talk about the cost plus model. And so, in my professional affairs role, for example, I go into schools of pharmacy and educate the next generation of pharmacists about following the money. And a lot of people don't even realize this either. But most of the drugs we focus on are over what we call in that pharmacy benefit with your. You go to your retail pharmacy and you pick up those drugs. Where the most egregious cost marks ups are happening are not in pharmacy benefits, they're over in the medical benefit. Those drugs that you go to the doctor's office and get infused, or you go to an infusion center. A lot of your cancer and chemotherapies are over in those infused medical drugs. And those are controlled by the medical carriers, not the pharmacy carriers. And the markups over there are even steeper and more egregious to the point where, unless you have a good broker advisor, you have no idea what you're paying in terms of markups. Even the way those drugs are priced is radically different than how they're priced over in the pharmacy, believe it or not. And so education has to be part of the solution. And I don't know that we're, I'll just leave it at this. I think schools of pharmacy at least are focused way too much, way too heavily on clinical and not enough on the operations and following the money. And I'll just pause there. I'm sorry, my soapbox.

SPEAKER_00 23:05

I I think it's a great soapbox. And it it leads me to a question that maybe is going to be overly idealistic. And I think this speaks to the broader healthcare experience that we have, at least in our country, is the battle between healthcare as a social good and as an economic engine. And this is a tension that has been talked about for a long time. We're not going to solve it here. But I I gather that a lot of people get into medicine and pharmacy. I know a lot of people who are doctors because they are just trying to help people and they feel frustrated by the system. How much does that dynamic play a role here in the sense that pharmacies aren't teaching about money? I I didn't go to go to medical school to be a business person. I went to go be a doctor. And now I've got to deal with all this stuff. I mean, is that just a suck it up reality that we have to deal with? Or is there is there a better way forward?

SPEAKER_02 24:01

Well, another Star Wars analogy, balance in the force, right? Like you have to not focus on one thing completely or another thing completely. I think you have to have a balance and a focus on both. Maybe in pharmacy school, for example, don't focus so heavily on clinical that you lose the force through the trees. In most pharmacy schools, students have one semester of business and operations courses. That's it.

SPEAKER_01 24:25

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 24:26

And I think you have to have a focus on both. Like, and that's one of the things that I love about working on our network is we give an arm every pharmacy of the 18,000 in our network another tool in their quiver to help their patients. So instead of coupon clipping, is what I call it, they're hunting for the lowest price, they have our transparent pricing. And then they can focus on the patient and get back to practicing at the tops of their licenses. We just had a discussion with one of our network pharmacies on test and treat. A lot of states now are offering pharmacists the ability to become clinicians, essentially. In the state of Iowa, where this pharmacy is located, they've opened up a clinic. It's all cash pay where patients can go in and get diagnosed if they have influenza or pneumonia or something like that on a weekend, for example, in a rural community where the physician is not there on a weekend. So I think the pricing and removing that barrier is something that I'm really proud of that our teams worked really heavily on in our network development to take that barrier away from pharmacists and get them to focus on what they do best, that clinical practice, giving a patient a vaccine to prevent that illness from happening in the first place, or finding the lowest cost option by becoming part of our network. Either way, they're not focused on the money so much, they're focused more on the clinical aspects of caring for their patients. But we offer them another opportunity or another tool in their tool belt to eradicate the coupon clipping, I call it.

SPEAKER_00 26:04

Yeah. What kind of what kind of response has the traditional pharmacy provider had kind of encountered with since you've shown up? Have you seen reactions on the other side? And maybe it's a two-part question. Number one, how have they responded internally and economically? And number two, do they push back on your model? Do you get lobbying or other things that come back your way as a disruptor to the network?

SPEAKER_02 26:33

Well, we like to remain Switzerland here, theoretically. Um, we don't focus too much on what else is happening out there. What we do focus on is being transparent, trying to widen our drug list, and we don't have a formulary, we don't have tiers. So every brand manufacturer out there, I am here to tell you we would love the opportunity to work with you. We do have a couple of brands, for example, on the Team Cuban card, which is our cash solution that is powered by the Cost Plus Drugs Affiliate Pharmacy Network. But we're here to try to get as many drugs that are FDA approved on our drug lists as we possibly can. Um we have seen some of our competitors come out with cost plus based solutions. However, I don't know that or have not focused, let's put it that way, on how transparent or non-transparent those solutions have been now that I'm no longer in the broker space. All I know is that we are trying to get all the drugs on our drug lists as quickly as we possibly can, of course, being A-rated or uh biosimilar or therapeutically equivalent on the biosimilar side. Um and we're always excited to work with even more manufacturers.

SPEAKER_00 27:53

Love that. I love that. I I we're getting close to the end. I have a question I hadn't planned on asking, but I want to ask, which is the peptide craze. How does that has that that's it, that's its own separate topic? We're actually gonna have a show on this later on. But uh for things like that that are maybe in this gray space, uh, how does that, how do those kinds of things show up in your in your world? Are are those relevant? Are these only for, like you said, FDA approved drugs? You guys aren't branching out into other spaces yet or anything like that?

SPEAKER_02 28:24

No, we we don't take on over-the-counter drugs for the most part. We don't um, I know the GLP ones are the topic de jour right now. There was there's always something out there that's a hot topic. We don't really chase trends here at Cost Plus. We just chase drugs that are FDA approved and try to get them into each and every channel that we can. You know, every time we put a drug on Team Cuban Card too, we have to be very thoughtful about making sure that we can get that drug into the marketplace as well, because we never ever want to drown pharmacies on our cost for reimbursements. The other thing we do is we pay those fair dispensing fees of at least baseline $12, even for commercial plans where the big three are paying zero dollars to 65 cents a claim for per commercial prescription benefits, which is ridiculous. That is not sustainable.

SPEAKER_01 29:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 29:16

So we're here to make sure that we have a transparent, affordable, and sustainable solution.

SPEAKER_00 29:21

I I love it. I think that's the that's probably the best, the the best pithy selling points we've ever had on this show. I think it's very, very clear what what what you're all about. Uh, last question before we start to wrap up, and it was the one I alluded to earlier. How does the consumer take back some power here? Because I feel like we're we're all the recipients, I don't want to say victims, we're the recipients of this experience, and we don't always have a lot of choice. So how do we do that?

SPEAKER_02 29:49

You've had the power all along. I have a lot of pharmacy academic friends that have like told me on the side, you know, off the record, hey, we have this insurance program, but my copay was way, way higher than your total cash program. So I just I sent it over to Cosplace Drugs. I'm like, great, use our network too. It might be cheaper for you. Some of our network pricing is even better than costblessdrugs.com. Um, shopping and taking off your insurance hat, don't always assume that your insurance is going to give you the best price. In fact, AJMC just published an op-ed about the fact that they looked at drugs that were $30 and higher on average. And those drugs, our total price on our solutions is less than a copay with an insured member having to pay out of pocket that copay.

SPEAKER_00 30:39

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 30:40

So shop. I hate to say it, but you got to be a savvy consumer and do your homework and look and see, hey, maybe this cash price is even better than paying whatever it is that my copay is, which could be thousands of dollars on a high-cost specialty drug. And by the way, we don't see specialty drugs here at Cost Plus, we see prescription drugs.

SPEAKER_00 31:02

Yeah. That that's such a great reminder and recommendation to be a good consumer and shop and don't always assume that your insurance is the best price. I I think most people just figure that's their only option. And so that's a great that's a great reminder. So, Aaron, we've we've talked a lot. This is a very technical, complicated experience. I'm so glad that you are leading it for us. What are two to three things that you want people to really take away, maybe in addition to being a good consumer from this conversation about the future of pharmacy, what you're doing at Cost Plus Drugs, and sort of how they take the power back?

SPEAKER_02 31:38

If you are a consumer or a patient looking for cash solutions, go to costplusdrugs.com if you're stable on maintenance medications and you're okay with a mail order solution. If you would like to keep your local network pharmacy and your human pharmacist interaction, which I highly recommend, you can go to teamcubancard.com, shop our list of thousands of drugs there, grab your own Team Cuban Card for free and take it into your local network pharmacy and have that great local customer experience and still get amazing transparent pricing. And last but not least, we didn't even talk about this, Michael, but Mr. Cuban's own newest initiative is called CostPlusWellness.com, where he's starting to contract directly with carrier or with medical providers and removing the medical carriers from the conversation, just like we've done with costplusdrugs.com. So there's all kinds of opportunity. You have the power if you are ahead of HR, a CFO, or a CEO to look at these opportunities and you know, continue your fiduciary duties under ERISA, which I know that sounds like a lot of vegetable soup. I've got a series on you know how that's impacting employer plans right on LinkedIn, and you can follow along there. So costlessdrugs.com, teamcubancard.com, and costlesswellness.com.

SPEAKER_00 33:06

Uh we'll include all of those in the show notes so people can get to them. And thank you for for doing this work. I I consider this work not just healthcare work, but it really is a social imperative, I think, that people like you and like Mr. Cuban are doing these kinds of things because this is what it takes. I think it's it's not just coming from above, it's people doing the hard work to build alternative pathways for consumers to get what they need. And I think that's really, really wonderful. Um, Aaron, as you know, we also have a closing tradition on our podcast, which is the last guest leaves a question for the next guest. And they always kind of work out, which is sort of fun. So the question that's been left for you, and I think you already, I'm gonna guess you already have the answer to this. We've probably already talked about it. What is something that you believed at the beginning of your career that you no longer believe now?

SPEAKER_02 34:02

That pricing in healthcare is tied to professionalism in healthcare. They are not at all. They are completely out of the professionals' control in some instances.

SPEAKER_00 34:18

Wow. That's a that's a tough one. We'll let that sit for a minute because I think that's what we've been talking about. So uh maybe we'll sli we'll we'll have another conversation on medical healthcare pricing just to get into that. Uh, Aaron, this has really been great. Thank you for your time again. Thank you for your work. In addition to the links that you've shared, anywhere else people can find you, follow you, make sure to keep following your work and the things that you're doing.

SPEAKER_02 34:41

Right on LinkedIn. Our company page is there. Uh, we post jobs there. I know a lot of folks always hit me up for jobs. The best place to follow us is Cosplus Drugs on LinkedIn. That's where we post our jobs. Um, and I have a profile there. I'm happy to connect with anyone. I'm a little bad about connecting from time to time, but I'll go in and I'll be determined to connect with everybody that's requested. So have a little patience if you connect to me. I promise I will get to you.

SPEAKER_00 35:07

You're you are a busy person, so I think everyone will be patient enough to follow you. Thank you again for everything. Thank you for those who tuned in today. Thank you for those who are listening on your favorite podcast platform. Again, please do go to YouTube, Apple, Spotify, wherever you go, subscribe to the show. Uh, we're really getting into some great topics these days, and I'm super excited to be able to feature guests like you, Aaron, in these really niche conversations that are they feel small, but when we talk about them, they're really big and they're huge and they affect everyone. So thank you again. Thank you all for tuning in today. We'll see you next week on the Top Voice Podcast.