Will Obesity Drugs Break the Healthcare System?

By Dutch Rojas

Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly are about to start raking in tens of billions of dollars a year on their new obesity drugs, say Wall Street analysts. That’s great news for the drug makers, certainly, but it could be a disaster for the companies and government agencies set to pick up the bill.

The new medicines, known as GLP-1 receptor agonists, promise body weight reductions of as much as 20%, and may cut patients’ risk of heart attack or stroke. By all appearances, they’re the most effective safe weight-loss drugs in history.

No surprise, then, that the demand for these medicines is huge and projected to get even larger as more supply comes on-line and more GLP-1s win Food and Drug Administration approval for weight loss.

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