Obesity: The Third Rail of Politics.

We spend 18% of our GDP on health care. It needs to be 12%. The new obesity drugs won’t get us there. As President I will. We need healthier people and we need health care companies to get paid WHEN they get better outcomes, not when they push pills.

From the article.

“Medicare still doesn’t cover drugs for obesity, but a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine warned that, in the hypothetical scenario that all Medicare beneficiaries with obesity were to use Wegovy, the cost would exceed the entire Medicare Part D budget. And if just 10% of obese people on Medicare were to take it at the net annual price of about $13,600, it would cost Medicare nearly $27 billion a year, according to the study. Unless the list price of Wegovy were discounted by more than 40%, the overall cost of the medication would eclipse the benefits to the U.S. healthcare system of lower obesity levels, according to a report by the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review.”