February 28, 2023 — To be sure, fear of change is understandable. The number of people living with obesity and suffering its complications has grown large. Achieving a balance between treating a problem like obesity and preventing it is tricky. To make it worse, we are living in a time when the media has figured out that fear and […]
February 8, 2023 — “I can’t afford to spend any more time here [in the hospital]. I don’t have the money.” These are the words of a victim in the mass shooting at Half Moon Bay, California, last month. It points to an uncomfortable truth. Increasingly, medical care is becoming a luxury. Helaine Olen describes it for the Washington […]
January 1, 2023 — While some of us slept last night, the calendar rolled us into the start of a whole new year. A clean slate with new challenges and opportunities. So what lies ahead? It’s impossible to know (as our review of 2022 predictions nicely shows), but that won’t stop us from offering our best guess. In that […]
December 5, 2022 — Move over, Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly. Amgen wants a piece of the action in obesity treatment. With some obvious pride of accomplishment, Amgen unveiled results from a phase 1 study of its dual action conjugate on Saturday. This new experimental drug, AMG 133, is a molecule that combines peptides to activate GLP-1 receptors (as […]
November 25, 2022 — “Can’t never could.” This old bit of Southern American wisdom aptly describes one of the startling reactions to impressive progress in obesity treatment – “we can’t do this. It will cost too much.” This reaction has been part of the landscape of obesity care for some time, so it should not be startling. But when […]
November 6, 2022 — A pair of thoughts kept floating through the halls of ObesityWeek 2022 and they set up something that seems like an economic doom loop for the future of obesity care. The new drugs for obesity are amazing. But they’re too damn expensive. Professor John Cawley gave an excellent presentation on the economics of obesity that […]
November 5, 2022 — It’s been quite a week in San Diego and we hope that everyone is safely home or on their way. So with the wrap-up of OW2022 yesterday, here are a few thoughts we’ll take home with us from this remarkable week. 1. Pediatric Obesity Care Is Set to Leap Forward It’s hard to miss this […]
September 17, 2022 — Yesterday, the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review conducted an impressive public hearing on the effectiveness and value of obesity medicines. ICER deserves credit for developing a complex and remarkably transparent model for objectively evaluating this. However, caution is necessary. This model is sufficiently complex to obscure two important facts about obesity and its treatment. […]
September 9, 2022 — Be careful what you wish for, says the wisdom of the ages. It’s all about unintended consequences. Right now, policymakers all over the political spectrum are wishing to solve the problem of drug pricing in the U.S. The simple fact is that drug pricing in the U.S. puts the best, most innovative drugs out of […]
August 2, 2022 — At what cost can we decide that obesity care is worth the money? Until now, the answer has largely been to refuse considering this question. But as the cost of untreated obesity adds up, it’s becoming impossible to dodge the question anymore and an increasing number of serious analyses are underway. The Institute for Clinical […]
