A Senate committee is investigating the prices that Novo Nordisk charges for its blockbuster medications, Ozempic and Wegovy, which are highly effective at treating diabetes and obesity but carry steep price tags. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, said in an interview that the…
Lars Fruergaard Jorgensen has a problem: Too many people want what he’s selling. Mr. Jorgensen is the chief executive of Novo Nordisk, the Danish drugmaker. Even if the company isn’t quite a household name, the TV jingle for its best-selling drug — “Oh-oh-ohhh, Ozempic!” — might ring in your ears. Across the United States, Novo…
Most people, study after study shows, don’t take the medicines prescribed for them. It doesn’t matter what they are — statins, high blood pressure drugs, drugs to lower blood sugar, asthma drugs. Either patients never start taking them, or they stop. It’s a problem that doctors call nonadherence — the common human tendency to resist…
Most people, study after study shows, don’t take the medicines prescribed for them. It doesn’t matter what they are — statins, high blood pressure drugs, drugs to lower blood sugar, asthma drugs. Either patients never start taking them, or they stop. It’s a problem that doctors call nonadherence — the common human tendency to resist…
Wegovy, the blockbuster weight loss drug, is now approved for a new use: reducing the risk of heart attacks, strokes and cardiovascular-related death in adults who have heart disease and are overweight or have obesity. The new indication, which the Food and Drug Administration announced on Friday, will pave the way for even more patients…
In June 2021, the insurance plan for North Carolina state employees was paying for 2,800 people to take weight-loss drugs. Last year, it paid for nearly 25,000. Medications like Wegovy cost the North Carolina State Health Plan $100 million last year, rising seemingly out of nowhere to represent 10 percent of its spending on prescription…
