Hannah Mamuszka and Lena Chaihorsky interview entrepreneur Mark Cuban about why U.S. drug and healthcare prices are so high — and what he’s building to counter them. Cuban walks through the drug supply chain: brand manufacturers sell to three dominant distributors, then pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) — the three largest of which are owned by […]

Hannah Mamuszka and Lena Chaihorsky interview Greg Baker, founder and CEO of AffirmedRx, a pharmacy benefit manager structured as a public benefit corporation. Baker, a pharmacist who spent years running on-site pharmacies for large employers, argues the drug-pricing system isn’t broken but “working as designed” to maximize shareholder profit. He explains how the dominant PBMs […]

Hannah Mamuszka and Lena Chaihorsky take on the drug pricing debate from the patient’s side, where the question is not what a drug costs but whether it works for the person taking it. Chaihorsky frames it with a metaphor that runs through the episode: we argue endlessly over the price of milk while ignoring that […]

Hannah Mamuszka and Lena Chaihorsky interview Kristine Ashcraft, a molecular biologist who has worked in pharmacogenomics since 2000 — first at Genelex, one of the earliest labs to offer the testing, and later as founder of the clinical-decision-support tool YouScript. Ashcraft traces the field’s slow adoption despite strong evidence. She explains that the vast majority […]

Hannah Mamuszka and Lena Chaihorsky talk with Jane Cheshire Gilbert, the CPA who spent two decades running the health plan for the Teachers’ Retirement System of Kentucky (TRS) and became an unlikely pioneer in pharmacogenomics. Serving tens of thousands of retired teachers — many in their 80s and 90s, on an average of 15 medications […]

Hannah Mamuszka and Lena Chaihorsky make the case that diagnostics — not just drugs — are the key to controlling healthcare spending, and that the U.S. systematically underuses them. They lay the groundwork for the series: primary diagnosis (what’s actually causing your symptoms), the “diagnosis of exclusion” trap, and two kinds of tests that determine […]