The chief executive of the drugmaker Novo Nordisk, Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen, is scheduled to face tough questions Tuesday on Capitol Hill about the high costs of the company’s widely popular weight-loss drugs.
Jørgensen will appear before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions during a livestreamed hearing Tuesday starting at 10 a.m. ET.
The head of the committee, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has been vocal about his frustrations over how much Novo Nordisk charges Americans for both Ozempic (used to treat type 2 diabetes) and Wegovy (approved for weight loss).
“In general, we pay by far the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. Same exact medicine sold in Canada, Europe is a fraction of what it is in the United States,” Sanders said in an interview Monday. “The result of that is that hundreds of thousands of people in this country who desperately need this product will not be able to afford it.”
This sounds kinda judgy to me.
And these are not the medications that they’ve started looking at to lower prices on. The Inflation Reduction Act had several pieces of it that are aimed at lowering the cost of several prescriptions, including insulin. There have been other bills created at lowering the costs of other drugs, such at the epipen. It’s possible to address multiple problems at once. Just because we haven’t solved pricing on all drugs doesn’t mean we can’t make progress on specific, overprice drugs.
The title to this post and the article attached is about these two drugs, that are both being touted as miracle weight loss products, not as a product for people with diabetes. Jesus, we have so many other things out there that are killing us that corporations have a strangle hold on, I’m just questioning why these two are in the spotlight.
And if it sounds judgmental to you, then you are just ignorant to the way the world works my friend.