No, actually it will make it worse since obesity generally lowers lifetime healthcare spending. This is counterintuitive but we barely spend anything on anyone who’s not a senior, so anything that helps people live longer generally results in higher costs. Dying of heart failure at 50 is comparably cheap to lingering for 10 years in assisted living and bouncing in and out of a hospital for 3 years before the end.
What’s even worse is that from a financial sense, private insurance generally covers the deaths earlier in life, while ozempic (or any other anti-obesity drug) will push a lot more of that spending onto the federal Medicare budget in the long term.
Ozempic is apocalyptic for the Medicare and social security budgets, even if it were free (and Medicare doesn’t cover anyone who’s not a senior anyway). Any drug that broadly extents life would be - we would be equally affected by a free pill that gave everyone another 2 years of life, too. We budgeted based on X number of fat people paying in, but never receiving benefits (via life-expectancy actuarial tables), if you extend life then the payout increases.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2225430/
This is broadly confirmed across a number of studies, a study of European healthcare found lifetime spending increases too.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37222003/
What’s even worse is that from a financial sense, private insurance generally covers the deaths earlier in life, while ozempic (or any other anti-obesity drug) will push a lot more of that spending onto the federal Medicare budget in the long term.
Ozempic is apocalyptic for the Medicare and social security budgets, even if it were free (and Medicare doesn’t cover anyone who’s not a senior anyway). Any drug that broadly extents life would be - we would be equally affected by a free pill that gave everyone another 2 years of life, too. We budgeted based on X number of fat people paying in, but never receiving benefits (via life-expectancy actuarial tables), if you extend life then the payout increases.