…and I use the word “fat” advisedly.
Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk officials have agreed to lower the cost of GLP-1 obesity drugs for Medicaid and Medicare recipients and those who pay directly and make treatments more accessible, President Donald Trump announced Thursday.
Medicare will begin to provide coverage for the obesity drugs for some people in mid-2026, which also might cause more private insurers to likewise add coverage for them.
The deal could lower the cost of the drugs to $150 per month for prescriptions that are available in pill form and that contain the lowest doses.
I remain skeptical, and here’s why.
I remember doing the math for Ozempic, and calculated that the cost per month (including the little single-use syringe) was about $5, for the .25ml shot. What you actually pay is about $150 per month.
As anyone who knows anything about this business knows, the .25ml (the “lowest” as quoted above) barely does anything to you, weight-wise: that’s the dose which prepares your system to handle the drug’s effects. The serious weight loss starts with the .5ml double dose — well, it did for me, anyway — and guess what happens to the cost. It increases exponentially with each increase in dosage.
I’ve had to quit taking Ozempic shots — as of last week, actually, because frankly, for someone trying to live on a fixed income amidst soaring inflation and prices of, well, everything except gasoline (which is still too expensive), I just can’t afford it. (New Wife, by the way, wants me to continue to take it because she thinks if it keeps me alive, that’s worth it. I remain unconvinced that it’s a lifesaver.)
My annual physical exam is late next week, and I’ll be discussing the matter with my GP.
Anyway, here’s the thing. Under Medicare, my BP meds, my gout meds and my statins and others cost me…$11 per month. Those drugs, I’m pretty sure, are actually saving my life; the weight-loss stuff? Who knows.
Maybe I’ll regain all the weight I lost (about 50lbs), or maybe I won’t. Maybe my diabetes has responded well to the weight loss, or maybe it hasn’t: the blood tests will tell. One thing Ozempic did do for me was change the way I thought about food, or at least the quantities I consumed thereof. I’m not sure that stopping the drug will make that attitude revert to its former self; I don’t think it will.
We’ll see. All I know is that as currently priced, the GLP-1 regime of drugs are unaffordable so I’ll just quit taking any of them until the cost comes down to what I can afford.
And if that decision ends my life, I don’t care. I’m 71 years old, next week, and as anyone who’s reached that Biblical age limit can attest, the prospect of death no longer frightens one as much as it may have done in earlier times — which is what I’m going to tell my doctor next week.
Let’s see what he has to say about it.
In the meantime, though, my reaction to Trump’s much-heralded “price reduction” of this stuff is pretty much encapsulated in the title of this post.
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