January 30, 2025

"Today, over 100 members of Congress support a bill to fund Ozempic with Medicare at $1,500 a month."

"Most of these members have taken money from the manufacturer of that product, a European company called Novo Nordisk. As everyone knows, once a drug is approved for Medicare, it goes to Medicaid. And there is a push to recommend Ozempic for Americans as young as six over a condition, obesity, that is completely preventable and barely even existed 100 years ago. "Since 74% of Americans are obese, the cost of all of them, if they take their Ozempic prescriptions, will be $3 trillion a year. This is a drug that has made Novo Nordisk the biggest company in Europe. It's a Danish company, but the Danish government does not recommend it. It recommends a change in diet to treat obesity and exercise. Virtually Novo Nordisk's entire value is based upon its projections of what Ozempic is going to sell to Americans. For half the price of Ozempic, we could purchase regeneratively raised organic agriculture, organic food for every American three meals a day and gym membership for every obese American. Why are members of Congress doing the bidding of this Danish company instead of standing up for American farmers and children? Because Novo Nordisk is one of the largest funders of medical research, the media and politicians and the medical schools all go along with them."

74 comments:

R C Belaire said...

This will not end well -- for the users/patients. Check back in 5 years or so for the results if this moves forward.

Iman said...

Put the fork down, America. Better education. Incentivize better health habits…

MAHA!

Enigma said...

Recall that the Fen-Phen anti-obesity treatment led to irreversible heart damage back in the 1990s. Get outside and exericse. Go to the gym. Stop overdosing on carbs (especially soda/beer, potatoes, and white bread).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenfluramine/phentermine

Kakistocracy said...

Around 70% of Ozempic revenue came from US. Thus the Government has a huge edge negotiating a stiff price cut, to benefit US patients.

That the drug companies who developed these revolutionary weight loss drugs are the targets of Congress while saving Medicare and the American health care system trillions of dollars is the way America works.

Politicians are penalizing the makers while not going after the processed food manufacturers and fast food outlets that created the problem in the first place. This underlines how they think.

The root cause of obesity in America, and perhaps many cancers, is the American mega-scaled food industry, providing the opposite of nutritious food loaded with chemicals and trans fats.

RFK Jr has discussed this problem and it should be addressed. Go after them with obesity taxes on the foods they produce. Congress has to think more clearly.

RideSpaceMountain said...

I foresee lots of pancreatitis and pancreatic cancer in user's futures.

Breezy said...

Do our Congress people get campaign support from Novo Nordisk?

Lawnerd said...

The data suggests that you need to keep taking these drugs to keep the weight off. The big question is why are Americans getting fatter. What changed in our diet and can we reverse the change. I find it compelling that the introduction of high fructose corn syrup tracks the obesity epidemic. Not proof but good enough for me to avoid that shit. Fructose is only metabolized in the liver which converts it to fat using the same pathway used in ethanol metabolism. Not proof, but enough for me to cut back on fructose containing sugars - sucrose, agave syrup, and honey.

RideSpaceMountain said...

Ask senator squawren, she's received millions from big-pharma.

Lawnerd said...

Most drugs make their money in the U.S. market. Other countries implement stringent price controls. The U.S. subsidizes drugs for the rest of the world through our pricing. It is outrageous.

Tina Trent said...

Maybe, pound for pound, RFK Jr., with his diverse adversaries and advocacy, is actually the right person at the right time for the right job.

Lawnerd said...

The funding of our political system sucks. I don’t know of a way to fix it without eroding free speech protections. But the funding, along with the stupid two party system really SUCK.

Breezy said...

Agree. Even if not confirmed for HHS, he has already had impact on Trump’s agenda in this space.

Iman said...

It’s worth a shot!

No pun intended…

tim maguire said...

I have relatives on Ozempic. They're obese and they've struggled with different diets, lost weight, gained it back, and now they're old enough to start having health problems associated with their weight. Ozempic has made a world of difference. They started losing weight right away and stopped having the food cravings that led to them overeating. To that degree, it is a game changer for them.

But Ozempic did not improve their crappy diets, it only led them to eat less. So they eat less crap, which leads to them losing fat, but they also lose muscle, they lose bone. They feel better, but they are not healthier.

Ozempic is a great tool to use when everything else has failed, but it is far from ideal and shouldn't be pushed until everything else has been tried.

Old and slow said...

The root cause of obesity in the USA is eating too much food, and making poor food choices. This is not caused by the food industry. We all swim in the same sea of food options, and we all make our own choices about what and how much to eat. Better decisions lead to better outcomes. It is neither complicated nor expensive to eat well and stay fit. That said, for people who seem unable to make smart food choices of their own accord (and I know and love some of these people), drugs like Ozempic may be the best and cheapest way forward. I am not qualified to say one way or the other, but I am a bit skeptical.

Christopher B said...

The Healthy Skeptic on weight loss drugs, with some interesting comments on drug approval trials. (Kevin Roche received a law degree and an MBA from the University of Minnesota. He worked as a law clerk for a federal judge, at the Minnesota Attorney General’s office and at the law firm of Lindquist & Vennum. He was assistant general counsel at Park Nicollet Medical Center and American MedCenters before becoming General Counsel of UnitedHealth Group, a position he held during the company’s rapid growth and multiple acquisitions. Mr. Roche then founded and ran the Ingenix (now Optum Insight) division of UnitedHealth.)

Old and slow said...

I would imagine that they are healthier with less fat. It would be better if they had not also lost muscle and bone density, but the loss of body fat is still probably a net positive. I hope that this drug does not turn out to have terrible long term side effects.

NKP said...

Let them eat cake! Or any other damn thing they want.

If the govt. must get involved, develop a system of “warning” labels (“Consuming more than the recommended daily amount of product ingredients is harmful to your health and will make you fat and ugly.”).

If you think the govt. should be responsible for protecting people from themselves, perhaps all food items should be “by prescription only.”

My personal practice is to avoid anything with ingredients I can’t spell or pronounce. Just for fun, ask a healthier and holier than thou Vegan to opine on the ingredients in his/her Beyond Burger

gilbar said...

Apparently, the MAIN advertiser on network news is Big Pharma.
I wonder why that would be?
I also wonder what would happen, if we went back to the old rules; where Pharma COULDN'T advertise on TV?

Mr Wibble said...

For most of history, people were underweight, sometimes dangerously so. Something like 40% of military-aged men during WWII were unsuitable for military service due to being underweight. This isn't any better than obesity. Some of what we're seeing then the result of Americans simply not being malnourished, with other effects such as increased height.

We eliminated food insecurity and malnutrition, allowing Americans access to cheap calories. Mechanization removed many of the physical tasks of daily life (chopping wood, laundry by hand, hauling water), and we shifted to sedentary office jobs and mechanized manufacturing. A lot of our entertainment became more sedentary, such as video games and television. We expanded out of the cities thanks to newly built road networks and better automobiles.

I also suspect two other factors: increased use of pharmaceuticals having a mental and physical impact, and the impact of improved sanitation. Drugs affect mental and physical chemistry, leading to issues like overeating or metabolism changes, while improved sanitation mean that we no longer see the negative effects of many formerly common parasites that often caused illness and malnutrition.

Tom T. said...

We've spent decades telling obese people to just eat less, and it hasn't worked. These drugs are expensive upfront, but they have the potential to save the system a lot of money on obesity-related medical costs, and hopefully any side effects can be improved upon with time.

NKP said...

“Putting down the fork” oversimplifies the issue. Some people eat because they’re depressed or just bored. There’s a reason some things are called “Comfort Food”. Sometimes there’s an occupational hazard. Years ago, I was in one of the service academy hospitals (DVT) during the summer break.

Only two other guys incarcerated with me. A heart attack victim who continued to smoke ‘em and the Executive Chef at the giant academy dining hall (3 fabulous meals a day for 3-4,000 students). As a visiting college athlete, who had eaten there many times in the past, I can vouch for the tasty and generous offerings. Bottom line - my well-over- 300-pounder neighbor confessed that he spent the whole day sampling a bite of this or that as he went about his business. Adds up.

Steven said...

"Because Novo Nordisk is one of the largest funders of medical research, the media and politicians and the medical schools all go along with them"

I wonder if there is a name for this logical fallacy. It's a kind of tendency towards believing in conspiracies.

People like a drug that will cure obesity, because they do not want to diet and exercise. American drug companies have been investing money in trying to find such a drug for decades. I have a relative who worked in pharma research in the early 2000s on exactly that. Novo Nordisk got there first.

Everyone knows that you can diet and exercise your way to get thinner. Yet, in my entire life of doctors telling people to lose weight, and public health officials warning about an obesity epidemic - still most people do not do these things. Ozempic seems like a fine solution.

Should medicare/medicaid pay for it? That's a different issue, but I think the answers are yes/no, respectively.

hawkeyedjb said...

"If it's a good thing, government should pay for it." That's how we got our trillion dollars a year in interest payments. Here's another idea: let's have a tax increase for every new thing paid for by government.

Jaq said...

I think that a lot, but not all, of the issues with GLP-1s are associated with any sustained period of calorie deficit. Your body begins to cannibalize its own protein.

Jaq said...

Fructose is also a contributor to gout. It's not just the lamb chops, it's also the mint jelly.

guitar joe said...

I wouldn't even consider taking this drug or anything like it. I wouldn't do the stomach surgery, either. I just don't trust those things to be without consequences, especially Ozempic. And I sure as hell don't think it should be paid for by Medicare or Medicaid. That's a sure path to overprescribing.

Jaq said...

A better plan would be a time machine that moved our diet and daily exercise back to the 70s or 80s, when nearly everybody was skinny, maybe partly due to the fact that people who had anxiety smoked to relieve it, instead of eating, but, since that doesn't seem possible, this is maybe the best solution available here in the real world.

FredSays said...

Because of the unknown long-term consequences of this and other similar drugs, this should only be prescribed for the morbidly obese not the cosmetically obese.

Christopher B said...

Side effects improve over time? The side effects of a drug don't change though it is possible drugs with different (hopefully less severe or more manageable) ones may be found but that is far from certain.

Also, read the link from my comment above. Per Mr. Roche, one of the problems with expanding the usage of these drugs is the original safety/efficacy trials are targeted by drug companies to the precise population that might benefit the most from the drug (diabetics in the case of these). There is a good chance the population of diabetics is not representative of the population taking the drug once the usage is expanded to include weight loss. The actual impact of side effects may have been masked by ordinarily occurring complications from diabetes.

tim maguire said...

Short-term, yes. I'm explicit about supporting the use of Ozempic in some cases. But long-term, no. I don't think they will lead healthier lives unless they make other changes that they don't need Ozempic to make.

bflat879 said...

There is only one reason a drug can charge $1500 a month, someone else is paying for it. Let's face it, you can afford a lot of weight watchers and gym memberships for $1500 a month. We do NOT want to pay for Ozembic.

Krumhorn said...

I had the same thought. I’ve generally regard him as a bit of a nut job, but his adversaries and cousins and ex wives have converted me to hoping he gets confirmed. I’m ornery that way.

- Krumhorn

RCOCEAN II said...

Its the same old story, some people who true eating problems and are massively obese will probably benefit from the drug. Some people just have a genetic complusion to eat. That little switch in our brain that goes on and says "I'm full" doesn't work for them. And It certainly beats having your stomach stapled.

But then there are tons of people who just lack the will power and wont put the fork down and put on their walking shoes. I'd rather pay for a fitness program then a overpriced drug.

RCOCEAN II said...

The problem with gym memberships for fatties is they only work if you give their personal trainers whips and guns.

JAORE said...

So, surprise, surprise, surprise, Congress Critters are getting big bucks from big pharma. Now tell me how many of these people (or their spouses) own lots of shares in Novo Nordisk? How many acquired shares before this push to add it to OUR tab?

John henry said...

I do not understand why Ozempic is so expensive. The active ingredient is off-patent and while not pennies, is still not that that expensive. The main thing the consumer is paying for, as with the EpiPen is the injector system.

I understand that the injector pen adds convenience, but the pen itself (if it is like the Epipen) is pretty complex and expensive to produce and assemble.

People got by for a century carrying epinephrine syringes before the pen. The syringes, with carrying case, are (were?) available on Amazon for about $20 for 2.

Is there a reason why Ozempic is not made available in standard syringes for people who can't afford the injector?

Another reason for the expense is that Novo has FDA regulatory protection on the injector. Nobody else is approved. I assume they have patent protection as well but don't know for sure.

John Henry

Jaq said...

I bet that vaping nicotine would work, but it looks like smoking, and there was that time that somebody used the wrong oil in their homemade cannabis vapes, so any weight loss and anti-anxiety benefits of nicotine are not allowed. I wonder if anybody has ever studied nicotine patches for weight loss?

Lazarus said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Jaq said...

So I went on "scholar.google.com" and looked up the health risks of vaping, and found a lot of weasel words claiming it's harmful, or studies that say that the heart effects are "unclear" which to me says that they are probably not that severe, compared to obesity and crippling anxiety that a lot of young people seem to suffer from since smoking has all but ended among recent generations.

Lazarus said...

How many have Novo Nordisk stock?

Is this the time we should be trusting the Danes?

And can we sue the politicians after we get the side effects?

Wasn't there some controversy about the trials for the COVID vaccines not being valid tests of the vaccine's efficacy and dangers? Who wants to go through that drama and trauma again?

n.n said...

All of our food is organic (i.e. carbon-based). He's right about diet and kinetic activity to promote health and longevity, while mitigating pathogenic progress and medical profit.

Peachy said...

I see we are back to stupid.

Peachy said...

All this is: Funding big pharma and fat people - with our tax dollars.

You better do it - or Selena Gomex will cry on camera.

n.n said...

Ozempic is analogous to elective abortion that treats a progressive condition after a choice is made in all but some rare cases where there is evolutionary or environmental origin.

Sebastian said...

NKP: "“Putting down the fork” oversimplifies the issue." Yes and no. Sure, for many people it's hard to do, for many reasons. But chemical solutions aside, it's also the only way. To shed weight you have to eat less--i.e., put out more energy than you take in.

pacwest said...

"Government funded" makes me cringe almost instinctively no matter what the subject.

Tom T. said...

Yes, I meant that hopefully the development of refined versions of the drugs would reduce the side effects. I take the point that the drug was primarily tested on diabetics, but I would also think that there some likelihood of fewer side effects among a population that isn't also afflicted with diabetes.

Professor Mojo said...

Clearly, we should wait for the shock unveiling of DeepLoss by a foreign-owned company, promising the same results for 300/month or less. That will be followed by a dozen cheap knock-off injector systems being sold on Amazon along with generic semaglutide cartridges,

Ampersand said...

Unprecedented caloric abundance creates unprecedented health hazards. According to "23 and me", the DNA profiling company, there are 762 genetic variants that incline us to either overweight, average weight, or underweight. Not all of them are equally important, of course. For me, 396 of these point to underweight, and 366 point to overweight. My actual weight is 4 pounds less than the average for my sex, age and height.
This isn't a "proof" of genetic determinism, but it is intended to highlight the strong genetic component of obesity. Pharmaceutical quick fixes cost a great deal, and the potential for serious unintended consequences is staggering.

tolkein said...

My daughter has been taking mounjaro (?)since early December. She's paying privately (£130 a month, c$170 a month). She walk the dogs, looks after the chickens etc. The food cravings are gone. Her BMI has gone from nearly 30 to just under 26. Data I have seen shows real world falls in obesity in the US since Ozempic use kicked in. My daughter's diet is pretty healthy - she's vegetarian - but it's the food cravings going that has made the difference.
There's always trade offs, and I don't know why it should be $1500 a month in the US - 10x in the UK, paid for out of pocket, not via NHS or insurance.

tolkein said...

I agree. RFK jr, won't, I'm sure, be the tool of the drug companies and bureaucracy. How the West has got this fat is shocking. Watch the old videos. I was watching Lynyrd skynyrd and shocked by the audience - how young and slim everybody (except the band!) was.
https://youtu.be/6GxWmSVv-cY

Aggie said...

A retail dose pen (1 month supply) might cost $1500 per month, but an insured patient will pay about $500 for the first dose, then it goes down to around $15. Just because they charge $1500, doesn't mean it costs $1500 to make it. I would be surprised if the actual manufacturing cost for the product is over $20.

A good part of America's obesity problem is the insidious way that food chemistry has been developed to precisely stimulate certain food pleasure sensors. People get re-wired to pursue these tastes, to the detriment of nutrition. One of the things that the semaglutides accomplish, and I guess they don't know why yet, but they really short-circuit your sense of what tastes good. You have no appetite, but your tastes eventually tend to re-align to more nutritious, more natural items.

My daughter notes, on her business trips to Europe, that the food quality is much much better. That should be to our shame, but maybe one of the hopes with Junior' is that he'll start moving the consumer foods industry away from this philosophy of making foods hyper-palatable, and start stripping out some of these chemicals that accomplish this.

john mosby said...

I have "street challenges" that I play with my friends, or just in my head, as I go around my urban university neighborhood. They are based on Andy Cohen's games with rhyming titles. One of them is "Student or Strumpet?," as college girls sometimes dress indistinguishably from streetwalkers. Another is "Homeless and Mad, or College Dad?," since rich guys with college-age kids from their second marriages often wander around with a blank stare and 50-yo clothes, just like homeless dudes.

My latest is "Ozempic, or Meth Chick?" Rich ladies who use Ozempic to get rid of those last few pounds look scrawny and hollow like the "After" pics in those anti-meth PSAs.

JSM

Original Mike said...

Perhaps, given the huge expense of Medicare and Medicaid to the federal budget, politicians shouldn't be allowed to accept money from pharmaceutical companies. Does that infringe free speech? Congress could pass such a law and dare individual politicians the bad publicity of challenging its constitutionality.

Enigma said...

Eating simple carbs causes energy spikes and the desire for more and more carbs. Not eating enough protein means a person will never feel strong or full.

Low fat foods and non fat foods (e.g., milk or yogurt) limit the body's ability to absorb protein. Eat fat with protein and it'll be fine. Dietary fat is a side consideration, but fat causes trouble when combined with carbs (e.g., milkshakes).

Howard said...

Maybe that's the price of Greenland hidden in ozympic flab

Old and slow said...

It's funny, most of the chefs I have known over the years (including my ex wife) have been skinny to normal weight. My wife never ate a meal for years, or so it seemed.She just tasted food at work all the time. Miserable way to live if you ask me, but she wasn't asking.

Gemna said...

John Henry-
Semaglutide is under patent until at least 2031. It may be longer, we should have generic Eliquis, but we don’t.
Due to the shortage, the FDA has been allowing a run-around, so compounding pharmacies can make and dispense semaglutide. This will likely end soon.
Our government will prefer to pay $1500/pen rather than reconsider our patent laws.

Old and slow said...

People love to talk about "diet and exercise", but the truth is that exercise is a good thing in itself, but diet is how you lose weight. If you want to lose weight, you can either take drugs or accept that you WILL feel hungry much of the time. The thing is, hunger is a perfectly normal thing. There's nothing wrong or unusual about being hungry. It is not an affliction, it's the normal state of a healthy human being most of the time. I run 70+ miles per week and sometimes considerably more. If I were to eat as much as it took to avoid hunger, I would be fat. Exercise actually increases hunger. This should be obvious.

Larry J said...

“ Mr Wibble
For most of history, people were underweight, sometimes dangerously so. Something like 40% of military-aged men during WWII were unsuitable for military service due to being underweight.”

Those men grew up during the Depression. FDR wanted to raise food prices, so his agencies restricted what crops and how much farmers could grow. When there was 25% unemployment and millions were struggling, raising food prices meant a lot of people had poor diets. This especially impacted children. My guess is this was even worse for city people because they couldn’t grow their own food. My mother grew up as the daughter of a sharecropper, so while very poor, they ate relatively well.

Former Illinois resident said...

Meanwhile, while Congress advocates funding Ozempic prescriptions, we're also told that Ozempic has very serious long-term side-effects. Covid vax levels of permanent damage. So perhaps Ozempic is also deemed to be a stealth-mode population control drug,

Roger Sweeny said...

"For half the price of Ozempic, we could purchase regeneratively raised organic agriculture, organic food for every American three meals a day and gym membership for every obese American."

And it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference. Because they wouldn't use the membership and there is nothing magically weight-losing about "regeneratively raised organic agriculture, organic food". To a large extent, people won't eat it. If they did eat it in the same amount as present food, it would have the same fat-maintaining effect.

Former Illinois resident said...

Tom, we're not telling people to eat less. We're a culture that thinks "treats" are required for every school and work function, where processed food is a short-cut to feeding our families, and our meals are breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, dinner, and more snack.

Check out other folks grocery shopping carts next time you're at a big box grocery store. Note the bare minimum of fresh vegetables. Note the number of boxed prepared foods.

Roger Sweeny said...

A refreshing voice of reason.

Former Illinois resident said...

Sanders $2 million; Warren $1.2 million. Complete list posted today elsewhere.

Former Illinois resident said...

Because Big Pharma can charge consumers whatever price the market can (barely) bear. I've a friend on a life-long $18,000/month medical cocktail.

NKP said...

Agree, most working Chefs in busy kitchens are doing very hard physical labor in often overheated environments and have body types to match. The guy I mentioned managed such a huge operation he mostly roamed constantly to see that work was being done properly and that problems were solved instantly.

There are exceptions, of course. I had a passing acquaintance with the late Paul Prudhomme (wonderful guy) who loved eating good food as well as producing it.

John henry said...

Thanks, Gemma. I thought it was just the dispenser under patent

Nancy said...

@John Henry: We could set the price of all drugs at their marginal cost per dose -- and then no new drugs would ever be developed. Drug companies need to be reimbursed for their R&D, including for the overwhelming majority of drugs that never make it to market.

TreeJoe said...

I work in pharma (not for pharma) and follow closely the GLP-1 class of meds and their market dynamics.

From a drug class perspective, this is one of the most important medical advancements of anyone's lifetimes. These are like antibiotics and vaccines, with differentiated efficacy addressing an enormous and growing crisis. Far beyond the U.S.

That the crisis has roots in a sedentary lifestyle and poor food choices and low quality food manufacturing is not debated. The debate is that the trend has been worsening. If you've seen stats on the obesity rates of adult hispanics in the U.S. over the last 2-3 decades it's staggering - literally more than doubling in a single generation. This may have genetic dispositions, but it's environmental triggers.

This class of drugs is taking an epidemic and bending it's cost and impact curves down for the first time in decades. It's also benefitting other disorders - sleep apnea, COPD, heart failure and CV disease, hell there are positive signals in Psoriasis and others. Many diseases with inflammatory marker risk factors seem to - surprise - benefit when someone drops 15-20% of their adipose tissue / body mass.

Does that mean the companies who developed and commercialized these products are not greedy corporations? Of course not. And they'll operate accordingly.

Further, we need to stop talking about list prices. They are facetious figures that mean little. List prices operate in a system that rewards higher list prices - consider that in every other market, you want to highlight low list prices; but in drug pricing markets (Branded drugs at least), higher list prices with more discounts/rebates are rewarded more.

Anyway, the drugs themselves are potent benefits to humankind. How they are employed, and who they are employed on, and how they are used acutely or chronically, is a different manner.

JAORE said...

"All of our food is organic...".
Great point. I know a young chemical engineer. He buys "organic" food. I asked him which aisle would have the inorganic food. He laughed.

Interested Bystander said...
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Interested Bystander said...
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