Ozempic's Cost: Weight Loss Drugs Will Be Billed to US Taxpayers
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Or, you could eat real food, and live a long healthy life without drugs. If you're some kind of extremist.
From what I have read, many obese people are that way in spite of not eating bad foods. A loaf of multi-grain bread is 1500 calories. It would be easy to overeat that mindlessly, as I can attest from personal experience, but it's not junk food either. Adding oil, butter, etc. can turn low calorie food into fattening high calorie-density food. Granola is often touted as healthy but also calorie dense. Same for cheese, or peanuts. It would be trivially easy to overeat those and gain weight if one was not careful.
This lays it out with marvelous clarity: https://www.amazon.com/Rethinking-Diabetes-Science-Successfu...
Scott Galloway has been surmising this from the rooftops for a while now.
The drugs are appetite suppressants, I personally lean on the side that the companies making junk food will suffer, because people will just not want to eat as much if they're on the drugs.
Yeah -- I think if we can get a better grasp on how the reward systems of the brain work/how this could be a huge thing.
Actually if I think about it, the means might already be out there -- we're just not serious enough about the problem as a society yet. Regulation at the top level will probably come first at this point before a novel (likely expensive) treatment from a startup.
That aside, with how human nature is, I wonder if we'll see the pendulum swing back into society valuing (and thus assigning status) to people who are free of that addiction.
I think it'd be bad for internet companies that are heavily tilted towards addictive online activity -- the ones delivering value will probably be mostly fine, because they have at least some "tool" component.
For example Netflix -- as much as it can be an addiction/coping mechanism, it is legitimately a tool for enjoyment in healthy adults (essentially replacing/competing with going out to a movie theater by yourself or with others).
> Already, seniors make up 26.6 percent of the people who have been prescribed these and other GLP-1 agonists, including Ozempic, since 2018, according to a report from Truveta, which draws data from a large network of health-care systems.
> In the coming years, that proportion could rise even higher: The bipartisan Treat and Reduce Obesity Act, introduced in Congress last July, would allow Medicare to cover drug treatments for obesity among its roughly 50 million Part D enrollees above the age of 65; in principle, about two-fifths of that number would qualify as patients.
I did not know this and was pretty shocked. Of course I don't object to it, but didn't know this had happened already.
Also, the WHO is possibly going to put Liraglutide (Victoza/Saxenda) on the Essential Medicines List[0].
Ozempic (and other GLP1 RAs) helps people get to their goal weight -- they don't work for everyone but they do work to lower cravings for those other foods, for most people.