September 7, 2024 — Recently, Novo Nordisk CEO Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen did a rare interview with NBC News to talk about the high price of obesity medicines that are proving to be so important for so many people. It seemed like a dress rehearsal for his coming appearance at a Senate hearing on the subject. He brought up the […]
August 27, 2024 — How big might the semaglutide budget bomb be? The authors of a new brief report in Annals of Internal Medicine today are making a point. How threatening can we make this sound? Right up front in their title, they label their estimates as the “maximum costs of expanded Medicare coverage of semaglutide for cardiovascular risk […]
August 16, 2024 — Is the price for health equity in obesity care too high? Or do policy makers simply not care to make it a priority? Writing in the Washington Post, Reverend Al Sharpton tells us that advances in obesity care bring an appalling failure of health equity into plain view: “Despite rates of obesity among people of […]
July 29, 2024 — When the subject of equitable access to GLP-1s arises, contrasting perspectives of what is equitable become apparent. Last week in the Annals of Internal Medicine, an analysis of prescription data for GLP-1 agonists made two facts about their use very clear. First, their use for obesity is growing much faster than the use for type […]
July 26, 2024 — The rousing success of GLP-1 medicines for obesity and overweight evokes a wide range of feelings. At the National Academy of Sciences this week we heard lamentations from a scholar in exercise physiology. To him, these highly effective treatments are a distraction from the importance of focusing in healthy eating and active living. We hear […]
July 20, 2024 — In a perverse way, policies to address obesity have been effective in the U.S. But only for specific communities. As the recognition of obesity as a threat to public health has grown, some communities have grown more resistant to it. Others have not and disparities in obesity have grown steadily – between rural and urban, […]
July 11, 2024 — “Not everything is healthcare,” writes Chris Pope in an essay for the Wall Street Journal, questioning policy advocates who focus on disparity in social determinants of health. In his commentary, he expresses doubt about diverting money from healthcare to other social programs: “Social theories of health have become so popular because they allow states, nonprofit […]
June 27, 2024 — Today for the first time ever, the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee will be marking up the Treat and Reduce Obesity Act on Capitol Hill. This is a big deal simply because it means that finally, after a decade of advocacy efforts, Congress is getting serious about obesity care in Medicare. Technically, what the […]
June 24, 2024 — One thing is plain to us in the huge showing of interest in obesity at the American Diabetes Association Scientific Sessions (ADA2024). The scale of opportunity is large because the unmet medical need is great. And yet we face a tremendous problem of scale for coping with the need for obesity care. We have problems […]
June 12, 2024 — Senator Bernie Sanders doesn’t want to let this go. Novo Nordisk isn’t eager to cut its thousand-dollar list price for Ozempic. Nor is it eager to face a grilling about this in the Senate. So yesterday, Sanders announced that the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee will vote next Tuesday on a subpoena for […]
