Novo Nordisk yesterday announced a roughly 50% cut in list prices for their popular GLP-1 agonists, Ozempic and Wegovy. Those cuts will be effective ten months from now, in January 2027. This is largely a signal to the marketplace and an acknowledgment of the fading fiction of inflated GLP-1 list prices. It has been a long time since a substantial number of people paid anything close to the list price of $1,300 per month for Wegovy.

A Good Move for PR

More important, this is a good PR move for a couple of reasons.

First of all, it is getting some positive headlines for Novo Nordisk at a time when the public feels pretty sour about healthcare costs generally and drug prices specifically. So headlines about “Novo Nordisk slashing prices” are certainly good for the company’s image.

Inflated List Prices
Pad Profits and Hurt Patients

The most important win, though, is for patients whom inflated list prices genuinely harm.

The harm comes in two ways. It pads the profits of PBMs (pharmacy benefit managers) while raising costs for employers and other who pay for health insurance. The way this works is that a high list price makes room for PBMs to get a big rebate on the list price and those rebates help to pad the profits of a PBM. But those padded profits serve to make these medicines look unaffordably expensive for the people who pay the bill for a drug plan.

This prompts a knee-jerk reaction to yank coverage for these medicines – even though they are so important for the health of so many people.

The second way it harms patients comes in the calculation of copays. In many cases, a 20% copay that comes out of pocket for a patient is calculated from those inflated list prices. So the list price of $1,300 becomes an excuse for telling a patient to pay $260 out of pocket for Wegovoy. As we have pointed out before, this is an abuse of the system. That’s especially true when there’s advertising everywhere for prices as low as $149 per month.

Toward Affordable Obesity Care

The need for affordable obesity care is great. It’s a fact that drug prices are moving in a direction that will make it more affordable. So if Novo Nordisk gets some positive PR spin from making this clear to everyone, good for them.

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Flor de Pascua – Fulfillment, woodcut by M.C. Escher / WikiArt