An April 24 letter from Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders to the CEO of Novo Nordisk began with heartfelt thanks to the Danish drugmaker for inventing Ozempic and Wegovy, two medications poised to improve the health of tens of millions of Americans with obesity and related diseases.
But the senator’s grateful tone faded rapidly.
“As important as these drugs are, they will not do any good for the millions of patients who cannot afford them,” Sanders wrote. “Further, if the prices for these products are not substantially reduced they also have the potential to bankrupt Medicare, Medicaid, and our entire health care system.”
It’s a sentiment that comes up regularly among people who are huge fans of the medications and their close relatives, Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro and Zepbound. All of them work by masquerading as a natural hormone called GLP-1 and tricking the body into slowing digestion and reducing blood sugar.
The medications help patients lose double-digitpercentages of their body weight and keep it off — an average of 12.4% in the clinical trial for Wegovy, and an average of 18% at the highest dose in the trial for Zepound. It’s rare for insurance companies to cover GLP-1 drugs for weight loss alone, and Medicare is forbidden by law from doing so. But as the pounds fall, so do the risks of serious problems like type 2 diabetes, hypertension, heart attacks and strokes, and the medications can be covered to prevent these conditions.