Anti-obesity medicines are the newest class of blockbuster drugs. With drugs like Wegovy and other GLP-1s on the market, a debate has emerged about access and coverage of these highly effective medicines.
But these medicines come with a heavy price tag.
In a new ahead-of-print article, Benedic Ippolito and Joseph Levy find that Medicare coverage of anti-obesity medicines could increase annual program spending by $3.1 billion to $6.1 billion.
Join us as Health Affairs Senior Editor Leslie Erdelack hosts author Benedic Ippolito during a virtual Journal Club event to discuss his paper and its implications.
To conduct the study, the authors modeled direct drug spending as a function of the number of people newly eligible for these medicines, the percentage of those individuals prescribed an anti-obesity medicine, the percentage of doses that beneficiaries filled over the course of a year, and the annual price of the drug.
The authors used updated information on net prices for anti-obesity medicines, recent empirical evidence on adherence, and the potential cost offsets to review the potential budgetary effect of allowing coverage of such drugs for the treatment of obesity in Medicare Part D.
Date: Tuesday, August 27, 2024
Time: 3 pm – 4 pm ET
Online details will be shared with registrants 24 hours in advance of the event.
