Ozempic and Other Weight Loss Drugs May Reduce Medical Costs, Too

The arrival of Ozempic, Wegovy, and other weight loss drugs may ease people’s debts in some areas. A new study published this week shows that when people lose weight, their health care costs tend to drop along with it.

Emory University researchers conducted the study, which looked at health care spending among individuals with either private insurance or Medicare. They found that people who lost at least 5% of their body weight over a year tended to spend less on health care. The findings could have major implications for evaluating the value of new, effective weight-loss drugs, the researchers said.

Although obesity is not unhealthy in itself, it can raise the risk of many other health problems, including knee pain, type 2 diabetes, and obstructive sleep apnea. Previous research has suggested that these obesity-related conditions are not only damaging to our health, but our wallets. A 2021 study, for example, estimated that obesity in the US was associated with $260 billion in annual health care costs, as of 2016. While previous studies have found that treating obesity can reduce health care costs, the researchers say their new study provides an expanded and updated analysis of these financial benefits.

They examined data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey–Household Component, a regular and nationally representative survey of Americans’ health-related spending. The surveys were conducted over a two-year period, which allowed the researchers to track how people’s spending might change following any major weight change. The researchers focused specifically on Americans who had a body mass index above 25 (the cut-off for obesity) and who had one or more of ten chronic conditions, eight of which were associated with obesity, such as type 2 diabetes or back pain. . The researchers included 17,209 adults in their analysis, including more than 3,700 people who had Medicare.

Overall, the researchers estimated that privately insured people who lost 5% of their body weight spent an average of 8% less on their health care (about $670 in 2023 dollars), while people who lost 25% of their weight spent less than 34% in health care. (about $3,000). The savings were the same for people on Medicare-wise, but the savings were higher because of their higher costs. Medicare patients who lost 5% of their weight were estimated to spend an average of $1,262 less (7%), and those who lost 25% of their weight spent an average of $5,442 less (31%).

“In this cross-sectional study, the estimated annual savings from weight loss among US adults with obesity were significant for Medicare and employer coverage,” the researchers wrote in their paper, published this month. JAMA Network Open.

The team’s findings come largely from people who lost weight long before these new GLP-1 drugs became available. Ozempic was first approved as a diabetes drug in 2017, for example, but was not widely placed off-label to treat obesity until after Wegovy was approved in 2021 (both drugs are made with the same active ingredient maglutide). What makes these drugs so promising, however, is how reliable they are in helping people lose weight. In clinical trials, people have been losing more weight taking these drugs compared to those taking a placebo, with an average weight loss of 10% to 20% over a year, depending on the specific drug. So it’s possible that the savings associated with weight loss may be even more profound at the population level today, the researchers note.

Another important consideration is that Ozempic and similar drugs are not cheap, with a list price of more than $1,000 per month. Many of these costs can be covered by people’s insurance, but many private insurance plans limit their coverage for these drugs, while Medicare is expressly prohibited from covering obesity medications (people can sometimes be covered if the drug is prescribed to treat obesity-related conditions). These high prices obviously affect any discussion of their cost effectiveness. At the same time, some studies have found that bariatric surgery can provide a net savings in health care spending by effectively reducing obesity, despite the fact that it costs a lot of money up front (about $26,000 per patient). And the researchers note that they only looked at health care costs related to people’s existing obesity-related conditions. Given that many people who take GLP-1 therapy today can avoid developing these conditions, the projected savings in health care could be much higher than their estimates, the researchers said.

“Improving access to new weight loss medications, as well as evidence-based behavior modification and weight loss interventions, should help reduce obesity-related health care spending in the US,” they wrote.

And it’s not just money that these drugs may have saved us at the end of the day, but lives. A study conducted earlier this year estimated that the high use of GLP-1 drugs could prevent the death of 42,000 people a year in the US from health problems related to obesity or diabetes.