SALT LAKE CITY — At a glance, Mark Cuban and Chris Klomp might not appear to have very much in common with each other.
Cuban is a well-known businessman and TV personality, best known for his role on “Shark Tank” and as the principal and now-minority owner of the Dallas Mavericks.
Klomp, a former health IT executive, rose to prominence building and leading Collective Medical, a company that coordinated care for patients with complex health issues, before it was acquired by PointClickCare in 2020. Now, he is the director of Medicare and deputy administrator of CMS, and senior adviser to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
But at the Silicon Slopes Summit on Friday, Cuban, a man who hasn’t been shy about criticizing President Donald Trump, and Klomp, a Trump appointee, explained to a packed audience how they developed a working relationship and mutual respect over one idea: making health care more affordable and accessible for Americans.
Frustration to fruition
Before coming together on the Silicon Slopes stage, Klomp and Cuban took different paths to reach their shared goal around health care. Throughout their discussion, the two shared playful jabs regarding their differences in opinions and backgrounds, all while sharing a similar goal.
Klomp, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, grew up in Idaho as the son of a doctor, idolizing his father the entire time. At 13, tragedy struck, and Klomp lost his mother to cancer.
“I had a chip on my shoulder over health care. I was mad. I was angry about it,” Klomp said. “I had this devil and this angel on my shoulder pushing me toward health care.”
Klomp went on to serve a two-year church mission in Romania, and while there, he met a church leader who had served as the CFO of BF Goodrich, who told Klomp that instead of becoming a doctor, he could “learn how to manage, and you might have more impact” in the health care realm.
That resonated with him, taking him from Brigham Young University to Stanford, where he and two of his childhood best friends launched Collective Medical before Trump appointed Klomp to oversee Medicare.
Chris Klomp, director of the Center for Medicare within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, right, jokingly gives an oversized Medicare health insurance card to Mark Cuban, co-founder of Cost Plus Drugs and businessman, during the Silicon Slopes Summit in Salt Lake City on Friday. (Photo: Isaac Hale, Deseret News)
Cuban’s entry into the space was a bit more out of the blue.
During Trump’s first term, when he began speaking of rolling back the Affordable Care Act, Cuban said people in Texas started turning to him, asking the entrepreneur if he could figure anything out
That got me into it, but it kind of went dormant for a little bit, and then I got a cold email from my now co-founder, Dr. Alex Oshmyansky, and that led to me digging into pharmacy,” Cuban said. “It became very apparent that one of the biggest challenges in health care, but pharmacy-specific, is that there’s no transparency.”
This led Cuban and Oshmyansky to co-found Cost Plus Drugs in 2022, selling prescription drugs directly to consumers with a small markup, in turn saving consumers significant money.
“In those four years, we’ve served more than 3 million customers. And we just keep on growing and growing, and we’ve expanded into manufacturing. So we manufacture drugs that are in short supply,” Cuban said.
‘You have to break these companies up’
Programs like Cost Plus Drugs and TrumpRx are important, Cuban said, because “big insurance companies “have more control than Chris or President Trump have over drug prices.”
Cuban explained that in the U.S., the biggest insurance giants own pharmacy benefit managers or “middlemen” that manage prescription benefits, negotiate discounts and process pharmacy claims.
“If (insurance companies) don’t make money from the PBMs because Chris has cracked down on them, they’ll just move it somewhere else, right? So you’ll see fees instead of rebates. You’ll see consultants instead of primary costs. You’ll see higher prices for specialty medications. They know how to gain the system faster and better than we know how to respond,” Cuban said.
“I’m generally a libertarian, but the reality is, you have to break these companies up,” Cuban said.
Attendees listen to a discussion between Mark Cuban, businessman and co-founder of Cost Plus Drugs, and Chris Klomp, director of the Center for Medicare within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, during the Silicon Slopes Summit in Salt Lake City on Friday. (Photo: Isaac Hale, Deseret News)
Klomp also took time on Friday to pitch the Trump administration’s version of Cuban’s platform, TrumpRx.gov, a website meant to offer consumers access to discounted prescription medicines and a central pillar of his efforts to lower drug prices in the United States.
“So now, there are two sites on the internet with transparent, postable lists of prices — exactly what you’re going to pay for a drug. And this is on branded pharmaceuticals versus more generic pharmaceuticals,” Klomp said.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Klomp pushed back against Cuban’s push to break up the biggest insurance companies.
Instead, he presented summit attendees with a call to action.
“The government isn’t going to generally solve problems. We know that. The government’s role is to create an environment in which you all, as insurgents … can challenge incumbents on a level playing field and solve problems. That’s free market principle,” Klomp said.
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.