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Comment by LeifCarrotson | Hacker News Reader

Are the drugs actually expensive, or just expensive for now because they can be?

Modern society basically decided that adding flouride to drinking water and iodine to table salt for everyone was better than dealing with tooth decay and gout.

I understand that peptide synthesis and cold-chain logistics are not as trivial as these elements, but this paper [1] estimates that GLP1 manufacturing costs can be under a dollar per person per month, orders of magnitude less than current market rates!

Perhaps our future society will normalize taking a daily GLP-1 agonist with their other multivitamins at breakfast.

[1]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

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I suspect a big reason for why Mounjaro is still fairly expensive here in Germany (I pay nearly €400 for a 10mg Qwickpen - a 12.5mg Qwickpen is nearly €500) is due to health insurance not being allowed to cover them for anything but diabetes treatment.

If health insurance companies would be able to cover these drugs, there'd have to be negotiations between Eli Lilly and the insurance companies, and insurance companies have a bigger lever than individual patients who pay out of pocket. Self-payers are just price-takers. We pay whatever Eli Lilly wants us to pay.

China can sell (at a profit) >99.8% pure tirzepatide, semaglutide, and retatrutide for <$3/weekly dose. This supply ends up at compounding pharmacies like Hims/Hers, but sometimes more directly to consumers through gray/black markets.

Another way to check if the marginal cost of production contributes to the cost of the drug is to compare the price of injectable semaglutide (~$1200) for around 10mg/month, to the price of oral semaglutide (Rybelsus), which is also (~$1,000) for around 420mg/month. That indicates that the cost of manufacturing semaglutide does not significantly contribute to the cost of the FDA-approved drug.

They are cheap now if you dig deep enough. Lots of vendors selling peptides.

Can you give some examples? And are those reliable?

Not an example, but maybe this is interesting for folks who haven't really heard of the peptide business before. https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2026/feb/05/injectable-...

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