The lower prices stem from the Medicare negotiation program created under the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on Tuesday announced lower prices on 15 costly prescription drugs under Medicare, including Ozempic and Wegovy.
The price cuts come through the Medicare drug price negotiation program created under the Inflation Reduction Act, which Joe Biden signed into law in 2022.
It’s different from Donald Trump’s “most favored nation” drug pricing approach, which relies on executive orders and voluntary deals with drugmakers — not legislation. Trump recently announced such a deal with Novo Nordisk, the maker of Ozempic and Wegovy, to lower the price of the drugs in exchange for tariff relief.
Maybe you should understand how they work before discussing them?
The workings of any particular variant are largely irrelevant.
In effect it still promotes the idea that rather than eat better and live healthier that your problems should be solved with a pill or shot.
Edit: Since diet and exercise are so unpopular here, I’ve yet to see anyone explain how it is that the average obesity rate in the USA has grown so significantly over the past century in anything beyond a ambiguous ‘medical condition’ or ‘genetics’.
The makeup of the human species hasn’t so dramatically evolved over the course of a few generations, that’s simply not how evolution works, but somehow despite supposedly nobody overeating everyone and getting plenty of good exercise we’ve gotten to a point where Americans are globally stereotyped as being big fat slobs.
Oh boy, if you want an honest answer to the whys and hows of the obesity epidemic, well, the truth is “it’s complicated”.
You’d be surprised at how much of it stems from government policy.
In their drive to subsidize the milk and dairy industry, the feds partnered with food companies to figure out ways to stick cheese in fucking EVERYTHING. To the point where feds embedded at pizza joints co-developed the idea of stuffed crust pizza.
https://fee.org/articles/why-does-the-federal-government-have-14-billion-pounds-of-american-cheese-stockpiled/
“To help sell its surplus in the 1990s, the National Dairy Promotion Board created Dairy Management Incorporated, a semi-public marketing branch of the USDA funded through government “checkoff” fees from dairy producers. This agency gave us the “Got Milk?” campaign and a host of popular fast food menu items, including Domino’s seven-cheese pizzas and Taco Bell’s very cheesy Quesalupa. A 2017 Bloomberg Businessweek investigation called the group of chemists and nutritionists the “Illuminati of cheese.” “The checkoff [program] puts DMI’s agents inside Burger King, Domino’s, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, and Wendy’s, where they’re privy to each restaurant chain’s most closely guarded trade secrets,” writes Clint Rainey.”
But that’s just one angle on the problem, another is the rapid increase in the use of high fructose corn syrup, not just as a sugar replacement, but as an addition to, again, fucking everything.
In the drive for “low fat” foods, producers started adding HFCS to enhance the flavor that was lacking in low fat products.
And, again, federal subsidies for the corn industry is where a lot of this is coming from:
https://www.mountsinai.org/files/ISMMS/Assets/Media/Profiles/MS_OpEd Ad_Obesity_final.pdf
“Consumption of HFCS has increased tenfold since 1974.”
Subsidies like this also drove the federal dietary guidelines rather than actual nutrition. When I was a kid they talked about the “4-4-3-2” plan. Every day, 4 servings of meat or dairy, 4 servings of fruit, 3 servings of vegetables, 2 servings of starch.
That was later replaced by the “Food Pyramid”, and TBH, I have no idea what it is now.
https://farmaction.us/2022/08/04/putting-our-money-where-our-mouths-should-be-the-great-contradiction-between-u-s-food-subsidies-and-dietary-guidelines/
And don’t even get me started on things like “food deserts”, we’ll be here all day:
https://www.news-medical.net/news/20240922/Living-in-food-deserts-during-early-childhood-raises-long-term-obesity-risk.aspx
Which is quite a lot of words to say eating too much no-nutrition highly processed fast food/easy-prep bullshit.
I’m not disagreeing in the least that the mass of HFCS and salt laden garbage is a big driver of it. However, those things only are allowed to become the staples of our diets that they have because people are too complacent and willing to open the freezer rather than do a bit of whole food kitchen work.
I’ve made it a point to learn what I can to avoid the loss of capability to make decent food for ourselves. As I say to my kids, I worry there’ll be a day when Grandma’s famous thanksgiving pie comes in a box from Sarah Lee.
Agreed, but the problem is honest attempts to avoid it. Unless you regularly look at labels, you’d be SHOCKED at all the products this crap is in.
Bread has HFCS. Ketchup. It’s literally everywhere.
Try going down the frozen food aisle at your local grocery store and notice all the stuff has cheese.
Yes, consumption is up, but the reason consumption is up is that it’s ubiquitous. And the reason for it isn’t that people are choosing it, it’s being placed in the products people choose because the government is subsidizing those industries.
It’s super hard to tell people “Well, just make healthier choices” when 80% of available choices are unhealthy or 100% if we’re talking affordable choices.
https://www.fao.org/newsroom/detail/healthy-diets-remain-unaffordable-for-a-third-of-the-world-s-population/en
Tell me you’ve never lived with an overeating problem without telling me. You seem to demonstrate a wild misunderstanding of how willpower and health are or aren’t linked.
There is a sizeable portion of overweight people whose weight issue is NOT overeating.
Unless those problems are caused by an infectious disease.