November 22, 2023 — The economics of healthcare bedevil us. Spending on it, with occasional interruptions, goes up year after year. Some countries spend less to get more, but the story is universal. The better we get at healing our health problems, the more we seem to spend on healthcare. In the case of obesity care, medical research has […]
November 15, 2023 — A trip into the world of pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) is enough to make our heads spin. It leads us to wonder: exactly who benefits from pharmacy benefit managers? The answer is not clear, but it seems obvious that patients in need of affordable medicine do not. In Search of a Fair Deal The biggest […]
October 24, 2023 — We have grown tired of the mindless repetition of a $1,350 monthly list price for Wegovy in endless news reports about the great expense of this very important new drug for obesity. Not because the drug isn’t expensive. But because that list price is not an accurate representation of what the drug really costs. So […]
September 17, 2023 — OMG. How can we possibly cope with the costs of treating obesity with these expensive new obesity meds? This question seems to be on the lips of many who pay for health plans. But a new study in Nature Communications turns that question on its head. How can we afford to continue withholding effective treatment for […]
September 12, 2023 — People are beginning to discover a major side effect of advanced meds for obesity that is not gastrointestinal – it’s economic disruption. Retailers, food makers, and participants in the huge business of health systems are all just starting to wrap their heads around the disruptive potential of more accessible and effective obesity treatment. Already, the […]
August 21, 2023 — How much might the application of new insights from the SELECT study of treating obesity do for preventing heart attacks, strokes, and deaths. A first pass at answering this question appeared in Cardiovascular Drugs and Therapy last week. Nathan Wong, Hridhay Karthikeyan, and Wenjun Fan estimated the potential for semaglutide treatment to lower cardiovascular disease […]
August 19, 2023 — The intersection of high U.S. drug prices with its high obesity rates is creating some unusual economics. Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) and the Peterson Center on Healthcare released an analysis this week that brings this into sharp focus. The analysis tells us that published prices for GLP-1 medicines used for obesity and diabetes are the […]
July 4, 2023 — JAMA Pediatrics has a pair of new papers today on the cost of childhood obesity. One of them adds up the medical expenses incurred by youth aged 2 to 19. The other editorializes about determining the value of interventions to manage weight. Both of them focus on pricing childhood obesity in the present while discounting […]
June 10, 2023 — Will new obesity medicines bankrupt health systems? This question, recently posed by Arya Sharma, is on the minds of many health economists and policy makers. Sharma predicts that costs will fall, systems of care will evolve, and eventually, the current “hand-wringing” will give way to scenarios that are not so bleak. But what about the […]
June 2, 2023 — Reporters are writing a lot about the unaffordable cost of new obesity medicines like semaglutide. They’re doing a lot of really solid reporting. But unfortunately, they are also pushing out a false narrative and just about everyone else is coming along for the ride. Time and time again we see journalists reporting inflated costs for […]
