On a sweltering 95-plus-degree afternoon in Austin at the annual SXSW Festival, Mark Cuban, co-founder of Cost Plus Drugs, and Linda Yaccarino, CEO of eMed Population Health, briefly turned the heat up on other companies selling weight loss drugs to consumers directly.
Yaccarino: Those other companies that I won’t mention by name, but deal either in compounding or that you can get —
Cuban (interjects): They start with R’s (those familiar with the world of direct-to- consumer drug platform companies will know that to be a reference to Ro).
Yaccarino: They start with R’s and H’s, a couple of H’s. They have a churn of over 50, sometimes 60%. And the reason for that churn is there’s no supervision. (Couple of H’s is another not-so-veiled reference to Hims and Hers.)
Cuban: Because they’re mostly marketing companies. (Hims and Hers ran a Super Bowl ad on weight loss drugs in 2025 featuring Hims and Hers branded medications. In 2026 Ro also ran a GLP-1 ad featuring Serena Williams during the Super Bowl, though it clearly mentioned the tennis star taking “FDA-approved GLP-1 drugs.”)
Yaccarino: Exactly. They’re a direct marketing company that just turned the knobs of the platforms to make sure they keep having people to come in.
Yaccarino and Cuban were at the SXSW event to promote their collaboration — eMed’s employer customers will now see their employee GLP-1 medication needs fulfilled by Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs. Miami-based eMed is a digital health company that provides at-home blood collection and GLP-1 weight loss programs.
There is no denying the fact that the efficacy of branded GLP-1s and their shortage led to a gold rush-type frenzy in which, almost overnight, compounding pharmacies began developing compounded GLP-1s outside the purview of the FDA. Consumers could access these medications easily and with little oversight, prompting some physicians to raise concerns about their safety. But Yaccarino and Cuban’s characterization of competitors leaves out some recent news involving a branded GLP-1 drugmaker and a distributor of compounded GLP-1 drugs. More on that in a bit.
Yaccarino was contrasting those companies’ high churn rate with eMed’s own strong retention rate, which she described as 90% — that’s the percentage of eMed’s users on GLP-1s who continue taking the medication even after a year. The high retention rate, she believes, is the result of a very different approach where consumers are part of a tight care community and are themselves accountable too. In fact, earlier in the discussion, Yaccarino went to great length to describe how eMed works with employers to serve employees’ healthcare needs.
“The thing of why eMed is the leading B2B employer program is because you have to check in with us every week. Takes less than 60 seconds. You have to check in. We have facial recognition, you get on the scale, we see how you’re progressing, we monitor your titration or your dosage,” Yaccarino explained.
So the user does regular check-ins and the company helps the user stay on the medication. It’s fairly well documented that when users stop taking GLP-1 drugs, they can gain back much of the weight they lost. Yaccarino added that if people discontinue the GLP-1s then they cannot get the long-term benefits of having lost the excess weight.
But GLP-1s are very expensive and most companies are wrestling with how to pay for them. In this context, Yaccarino and Cuban’s collaboration is notable. The eMed CEO noted how her company and Cost Plus Drugs are “two companies fighting for the lowest price possible to get the right medications to as many people as possible at the cheapest price, and we are happy to work together.”
Lowering the cost of GLP-1 drugs and increasing access has become a top priority, and not just for individual companies. President Trump has negotiated the prices of these drugs to be significantly lowered for Medicare beneficiaries as well as for average Americans who may not have insurance, through his TrumpRx drug coupon program.
And increasing access has led adversaries into each other’s arms – last week Hims and Hers announced that Novo Nordisk was dropping its February 2026 lawsuit against the direct-to-consumer company over its sale of GLP-1 medications. Novo had a collaboration with Hims and Hers that it withdrew from in June 2025 before filing the lawsuit. Now, as part of the agreement, Hims and Hers will sell Novo’s Ozempic injections and Wegovy pills and injections on its platform, and drop the marketing of GLP-1 medications. In other words, high churn — as Yaccarino paints these not-to-be-named companies of having — or not, clearly Novo saw the value of Hims and Hers’ customer base when choosing to renew its relationship with the company.
However, obesity is an expensive condition and multiple approaches to tackle it as evidenced by the collaboration between Cost Plus Drugs and eMed, are likely welcome by employers, employees, doctors and patients.
Photo: eMed
