April 27, 2024 — To open Obesity Medicine 2024 yesterday, David Arterburn presented a brilliant perspective on the radical paradigm shift and price wars that lie ahead in obesity care. Along the way, he explained how he believes that better obesity medicines can help meet a fundament goal of healthcare: to improve population health. He described the future of […]
April 16, 2024 — Right now GLP-1 medicines for obesity carry high list prices that engender great debates about how many billions (hyperbolists will say trillions) of dollars treating obesity will cost healthcare systems. For the uninitiated, it’s quite natural to think of metabolic procedures and obesity medicine in terms of either/or questions. No matter that this is a […]
March 15, 2024 — Prior authorizations are a driving force in the burnout of physicians, denial of medical care, and the profitability of health insurance and pharmacy benefit plans. By one estimate, healthcare providers spend $35 billion every year on chasing down prior authorizations so that their patients can receive the care they need – whether that is a […]
February 18, 2024 — Who knew that financial toxicity was a thing? Perhaps like us, you have merely thought of it as the financial burden of healthcare – without assigning it the status of a medical complication that dysfunctional healthcare causes. But recent publications are making it ever more clear that people living with chronic diseases are having to […]
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 […]
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 […]
June 29, 2023 — After four exhilarating days of new possibilities for overcoming diabetes and obesity at ADA2023, we had to come back down to earth. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence in the UK stepped up to this task right away. On Tuesday, NICE said nope to recommending tirzepatide use for type 2 diabetes in the […]
April 14, 2023 — For decades, we’ve watched growth in the prevalence of obesity and the chronic diseases it causes. Health systems have profited from treating those downstream diseases. Without really thinking about it, public health policy and payers have conspired to deny care for the root cause of those diseases – obesity. Bias inspired some of this because […]
