Excitement is building about a new generation of drugs that tout the ability to help adults with excess weight shed more pounds than older drugs on the market.
Some patients, obesity medicine specialists say, are experiencing decreases in blood pressure, better-managed diabetes, less joint pain, and better sleep from these newfound treatments.
The newer drugs, which are repurposed diabetes drugs, “are showing weight loss unlike any other medications we’ve had in the past,” said David Creel, a psychologist and registered dietitian in the Bariatric & Metabolic Institute at the Cleveland Clinic.
Yet for him and other experts, the thrill is tempered.
That’s because no single drug is a magic solution by itself, and it’s possible many patients will need to take the drugs long term to maintain results. On top of that, the newest treatments are often very costly and often not covered by insurance.
The five-figure annual costs of the new medications are also raising concern about access for patients and what widespread use could mean for the nation’s overall health care tab.
Evaluating the trade-offs — weighing the value of better health and possibly fewer complications of obesity down the road against the upfront drug costs — will increasingly come into play as insurers, employers, government programs, and others who pay health care bills consider which treatments to cover.
“If you pay too much for a drug, everyone’s health insurance goes up. Then people drop off health insurance because they can’t afford it,” so providing the drug might cause more harm to the system than not, said Dr. David Rind, chief medical officer for the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, or ICER, a nonprofit group that reviews medical evidence to evaluate treatments for effectiveness and cost.
Many commercial insurers currently limit coverage to only some of the drugs currently available, or require patients to meet certain thresholds for coverage — often pegging it to a controversial measure called “body mass index,” a ratio of height to weight. Medicare specifically bars coverage for obesity medications or drugs for “anorexia, weight loss or weight gain,” although it pays for bariatric surgery. Coverage in other government programs varies. Legislation that would allow medication coverage in Medicare — the Treat and Reduce Obesity Act — has not made progress despite being reintroduced every congressional session since 2012.
As insurers view the cost of treatments with concern, manufacturers see a potential financial bonanza. Morgan Stanley analysts recently said “obesity is the new hypertension” and predicted industry revenue from …….
Source: https://khn.org/news/article/weight-loss-medications-promise-high-price/