The new weight loss drugs are incredibly popular and incredibly expensive. Most insurance companies won’t cover them so they end up being available only to people who can afford to pay cash which is often well over a thousand dollars a month.
The medical consensus is becoming very clear that these drugs help prevent and treat serious disease by helping people control their weight. It’s not really debatable at this point. And most people believe that if Medicare and Medicaid cover them the price will come down and insurance companies will follow. The scale will make up for whatever profits the pharmaceutical companies are making at the higher price points.
The Biden administration is taking this up and in doing so is going to put the incoming Trump administration on a collison course with a public that is clamoring for these drugs:
The Biden administration, in one of its last major policy directives, proposed on Tuesday that Medicare and Medicaid cover obesity medications, a costly and probably popular move that the Trump administration would need to endorse to become official.
The proposal would extend access of the drugs to millions of Americans who aren’t covered now.
The new obesity drugs, including Wegovy from Novo Nordisk and Zepbound from Eli Lilly, have been shown to improve health in numerous ways, but legislation passed 20 years ago prevents Medicare from covering drugs for “weight loss.”
The new proposal sidesteps that restriction, specifying that the drugs would be covered to treat the disease of obesity and prevent its related conditions.
“We don’t want to see people having to wait until they have these additional diseases before they get treatment,” said Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or C.M.S., noting the growing medical consensus that obesity is a chronic health condition.
RFK, the former heroin dealer and obvious steroid abuser doesn’t believe in them:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his choice to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, has suggested that obesity should be tackled through healthy eating, not drugs.
“If we just gave good food, three meals a day, to every man, woman and child in our country, we could solve the obesity and diabetes epidemic overnight,” Mr. Kennedy said on Fox News before the election.
He’s an idiot. But there’s another Dr. in the mix who’s been a big proponent:
Dr. Mehmet Oz, Mr. Trump’s choice to lead C.M.S., has been more enthusiastic; he featured patients who took the drugs on his old television talk show. Dr. Oz’s portfolio would include Medicare and Medicaid policy, but he would report to Mr. Kennedy.
Oz isn’t going to do anything RFK and Trump don’t want him to do, obviously. So I would expect the incoming adminstration to nix this idea immediately over costs and because it’s a Biden initiative. (Trump makes most of his decisions based upon whether the previous administration was for it or against it.)
I would hope that Democrats or patient advocates or someone will make sure that the public knows about this because if he nixes it it’s not going to be a popular decision. People desperately want these drugs and have been waiting now for a few years for them to be covered by Medicare and then private insurance. Best case, Trump goes ahead and approves it and if he doesn’t people should know that Biden wanted to provide it and Trump denied them.