How Much Should Weight Loss Drugs Like Wegovy and Zepbound Cost?
It's easy to make a medical case for blockbuster weight loss drugs like Wegovy and Zepbound, which have been shown to prevent heart attacks and strokes and save lives.
But for the employers and government programs being asked to pay for the medications, the financial case for them is less clear. Are the drugs' benefits worth their enormous cost?
The answer right now is no, according to a new study published on Friday in the journal JAMA Health Forum, by researchers at the University of Chicago.
To be considered cost effective by a common measure used by health economists, the price of Novo Nordisk's Wegovy would need to be cut by over 80 percent, to $127 per month, the researchers concluded. And Eli Lilly's Zepbound would be cost effective only if its price fell by nearly a third, to $361 per month. (Zepbound warranted a higher price, the researchers said, because it produced greater benefits in clinical trials.)
'There's no doubt that the drugs are demonstrating tremendous health benefits,' said David Kim, a health economist at the University of Chicago and the senior author of the study, which was funded by government grants. 'The problem is the price is too high.'
There's widespread hope that the drugs will effectively pay for themselves in the long run, by making patients healthier and preventing expensive medical bills. It's not clear yet whether that will turn out to be true.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Miami Herald
2 hours ago
- Miami Herald
Women on Weight-Loss Drugs Warned of Surprise ‘Ozempic Babies'
Women taking popular weight-loss drugs have been urged to use effective contraception while taking the medication amid reports of a so-called "Ozempic babies" phenomenon. The advice was issued by the United Kingdom's Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), an executive agency of the Department of Health and Social Care, on Thursday. Newsweek reached out to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for comment via email. Demand for weight-loss drugs, including GLP-1 medications such as Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro, has surged in the United States. In May 2024, a KFF Health Tracking Poll found that approximately 6 percent of American adults—about 15 million people—were using GLP-1 agonists such as Ozempic, either for diabetes treatment or weight loss. Some experts have cautioned that women should use effective contraception while taking these medications amid reports that they may be linked to an increase in unexpected pregnancies, The Guardian reported last May. The MHRA issued its alert after receiving 40 reports related to pregnancies while using "GLP-1 medicines," which are known by the brand names Ozempic, Mounjaro, Wegovy, Saxenda, and Victoza. Ozempic and Wegovy contain semaglutide, which mimics the GLP-1 hormone to increase insulin, slow digestion, and suppress appetite. Mounjaro contains tirzepatide, which acts on an additional hormone related to blood sugar and appetite control. The MHRA warned that Mounjaro may reduce the effectiveness of oral contraceptives in people who are overweight. It received 26 pregnancy-related reports for Mounjaro alone. "Therefore, those taking Mounjaro who are overweight and are using an oral form of contraception are advised to also use a non-oral form of contraception," the agency said. "This only applies to those taking Mounjaro and is especially important for the four weeks after starting Mounjaro and after any dose increase." Hundreds of women have shared personal accounts of unplanned pregnancies while using these medications in online groups, including the Facebook group "I got pregnant on Ozempic." "My ozempic baby...I see so many posts about ozempic and asking for "stories or side effects," but I never see anyone warning about pregnancy... lol," one woman shared on Facebook. "If you don't know, I got pregnant on ozempic and so many other women have too..I was on ozempic for 6 weeks & found out I was pregnant. I was so scared, google had me frightened I would miscarry because of the ozempic. I then came across a group called 'I got pregnant on ozempic'. I started reading all of these stories about women fighting infertility and getting pregnant on ozempic." The Food and Drug Administration has not yet issued similar advisories in the United States. MHRA Chief Safety Officer Dr. Alison Cave said: "Skinny jabs are medicines licensed to treat specific medical conditions and should not be used as aesthetic or cosmetic treatments. They are not a quick fix to lose weight, and have not been assessed to be safe when used in this way. "Our guidance offers patients a 'one stop shop' for our up-to-date advice on how to use these powerful medicines safely. "This guidance should not be used as a substitute to reading the patient information leaflet or having a conversation with a healthcare professional as part of the prescribing process." Dr. Ilana Ressler, a reproductive endocrinologist at Illume Fertility, told Interesting Engineering on May 22: "There is this phenomenon of Ozempic what I think what's happening is women who may not have been ovulating before with the improvements that the medication is bringing on, that might be helping them to ovulate more regularly and they might be more likely to conceive while on the medication than not—so it is recommended to avoid pregnancy while taking the medication." Dr. Zuri A. Murrell, in a video on X last year: "There is nothing magical about the medicine that's in Ozempic that helps you get pregnant. But what it does is that a lot of times, when people can't, it's because of a hormone weight imbalance. "And so, when you lose weight, and sometimes when you lose weight rapidly, the hormones and the new you aren't in concert. Or they really are in concert, and guess what can happen, pregnancy. "So, it's not the Ozempic itself, it is actually the balancing out of your hormones. That means that you've lost fat, and that the body actually for you is working like it should. So just remember, Ozempic is not something that somebody takes and 'I'm pregnant.' What it does do is cause your body and hormone level to be more in sync and more likely that you can." It remains unclear whether the FDA will follow the MHRA's lead in issuing similar warnings or guidance on contraception. Related Articles Therapist Asks Who Women 'Want To Be Skinny For'-Her Theory Is Eye-OpeningThe Good Life: Weight Loss Wins, But at What Cost?How Ozempic and Other GLP-1 Drugs Are Eating Away at Body PositivityGen Z Is Leading a New Weight Loss Trend: Ozempic Microdosing 2025 NEWSWEEK DIGITAL LLC.
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
TikTok Banned the "SkinnyTok" Hashtag. It's Only a Matter of Time Until a New Insidious Diet Trend Replaces It
iantfoto In this op-ed, Features Director Brittney McNamara considers TikTok's SkinnyTok hashtag ban and the seemingly unbeatable monster of diet culture. If you've been on social media lately, you undoubtedly know about #SkinnyTok. Along with the rise in popularity of weight loss drugs like Zepbound and Wegovy over the last few years, thinness as an ideal has also returned to our cultural lexicon, spawning a whole hashtag full of creators discussing how they get and stay thin, swapping diet and workout tips that encourage sometimes extreme measures to be skinny. But on June 3, TikTok banned #SkinnyTok as a search term after concern from European legislators about how the app can negatively impact young people's body image, according to the New York Times. The hashtag had 'become linked to unhealthy weight loss content,' TikTok said in its reasoning for the ban, something the European Commission was investigating because of the potential 'public health risk' associated with promoting 'extreme thinness' to young people online, Politico reports. Now, when users enter that search term, they'll be directed to resources like the National Alliance for Eating Disorders. We know that social media can negatively affect our mental health, and can contribute to body image issues like body dysmorphia and even eating disorders, so this move is an all-around win. There is no benefit — even if society would like to tell you there is — to promoting extreme thinness or unhealthy diets, things that #SkinnyTok was often associated with. But even though the ban is a net positive in this sense, it's simply a bandaid on a much larger issue. Until we reckon with our cultural obsession with thinness and our wholesale buy-in to diet culture, #SkinnyTok will simply shift and transform, taking on a new slender shape online. According to Today, #SkinnyTok began appearing on TikTok around the start of this year, gaining steam in March and April. Videos under the hashtag encouraged viewers to eat less, making hunger seem like a virtue and repackaging harmful diet advice as 'tough love." If you weren't dieting and participating in behaviors to make yourself smaller, many #SkinnyTok posts were there to shame you into submission. It's not clear exactly who started the hashtag, but it is apparent how it gained popularity. Social media and other online forums have long been hotbeds for extreme diet talk and for promoting unhealthy body ideals. In the heyday of Tumblr, 'pro ana' (pro anorexia) and 'thinspo' content abounded. When those topics were banned, users found ways to evade that, substituting letters or words to signal their content to other users without triggering filters that would censor their posts. Meta whistle-blower Frances Haugen revealed internal research that found that 'when [32% of teen girls] felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse.' As a result of that information, social media executives testified before Congress in 2021, in part about the ways their platforms impact young people's body image. Just before #SkinnyTok officially earned its title, content creator Liv Schmidt was ousted from TikTok in October 2024 because of her posts instructing viewers on how to be skinny. Her posts violated TikTok's Community Guidelines, which prohibit 'promoting disordered eating and dangerous weight loss behaviors.' But before her ban, Schmidt had more than 670,000 followers on TikTok, according to the New York Times. She claimed her instructions on how to eat less with the explicit goal of being thin were simply the pursuit of a certain aesthetic, not a roadmap to potentially disordered eating. Even more recently, Schmidt's group chat called the Skinni Societe was demonetized by Meta after The Cut published an inside look at Schmidt's advice to followers, including lines like "eat like your next weigh-in is tomorrow.' The resurgence of explicit diet talk and 'thinspo' on social media is evidence of a trend we've seen growing for a while now. The advent of GLP-1 drugs has made weight loss attainable for many, and has made getting even thinner an option for many already-thin people. And, with another Trump administration in office, a focus on thinness in society is no surprise. Research has shown a link between conservative ideology and anti-fatness, something we've seen mirrored in Trump's own language. So it's not necessarily a shock that people with fatphobic ideas would feel emboldened in this time, especially. TikTok's #SkinnyTok ban is certainly the right move, and it's encouraging to know that people searching for it on that platform will instead be served resources to cope with disordered eating. But as we can see from the long history of disordered eating and 'skinny' content online, this move is likely to remove one threat, only for another to pop up in its wake. Diet culture is much like the mythological hydra; when you cut one head off of this beast, two more grow in its place. The threats get more numerous, more insidious, the more we strike at it. To truly beat #SkinnyTok and trends like it, we'd need a cultural reckoning — one where we collectively decide that thinness isn't a value, but simply one of many states of being. We'd need to grapple with the racism and anti-Blackness baked into anti-fatness, and how promoting thinness has ties to white supremacy. We'd need to address anti-fat bias in medicine, and rethink the common tropes about fatness and health. We'd need to radically change our thinking, our social structures, our collective stereotypes. We'd need to then cauterize the wounds diet culture has left, making sure no new ugly heads could rear when we turn our backs. Judging by the current political and social climate, that seems unlikely. It's certainly possible, and maybe one day we'll get there. In the meantime, #SkinnyTok may be dead, but it's only a matter of time before another hashtag or trend telling young people to aspire to thinness crops up, another head of this seemingly unkillable hydra ready to bite us in our ever-smaller butts. Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
Women on blockbuster weight loss drugs warned to use effective contraception
Pregnant women should not take weight loss drugs, the UK's medicines regulator warned amid concerns that people are using the so-called 'skinny jabs' in unsafe ways. The UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) also said women should not take weight loss drugs if they are breastfeeding or trying to get pregnant, because there isn't enough safety data to know whether the medicine could affect their baby. 'Anyone who gets pregnant while using them should speak to their healthcare professional and stop the medicine as soon as possible,' the agency said. Meanwhile, all women taking the jabs should ensure they are using a form of contraception that works, the MHRA said. Related Weight-loss drugs like Wegovy could help serious liver condition that has no cure-all treatment One of the drugs, Mounjaro, may make birth control pills less effective, so the agency says women taking the jab should also use a non-oral form of contraception, like an implant or intrauterine device (IUD). 'Obesity reduces fertility in women. So, women with obesity taking GLP-1 drugs are more likely to get pregnant than before they lost weight,' Dr Channa Jayasena, a reproductive endocrinology researcher at Imperial College London, said in a statement. 'Women are advised to do all they can to prevent pregnancy while taking [these] drugs,' Jayasena added. Related France won't pay for weight loss drug Wegovy. What about other European countries? In the UK, women already receive these warnings when they get their prescriptions for the blockbuster jabs, which include Ozempic, Wegovy, Saxenda, and Victoza as well as Mounjaro. The drugs, known as GLP-1 receptor agonists, work by mimicking hormones that help regulate appetites and make people feel full for longer. They have been approved to treat type 2 diabetes and obesity. Related Why are 1 in 10 French women still smoking during pregnancy despite the health risks? But the MHRA issued the reminder Thursday due to concerns that the drugs' growing popularity means women are buying them illegally online or at beauty salons, without seeing a doctor. 'Skinny jabs are medicines licensed to treat specific medical conditions and should not be used as aesthetic or cosmetic treatments,' Dr Alison Cave, MHRA's chief safety officer, said in a statement. 'They are not a quick fix to lose weight and have not been assessed to be safe when used in this way,' she added.
