A uncommon challenge unites People throughout the political divide: the nation’s damaged healthcare system, which is slowly killing its residents. The disaster has even bridged the hole between unlikely allies: MAGA proponent and billionaire Elon Musk and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
Sanders, a champion of Europe’s social market mannequin, not too long ago joined President Biden in urging Danish drugmaker Novo Nordisk to slash the costs of its well-liked therapies.
The shortcoming to offer inexpensive entry to life-saving medicine, significantly for diet-induced diabetes and weight problems, claims greater than 43,000 lives yearly—deaths that might be prevented if the costs of medicines like Ozempic and Wegovy have been decrease.
“Fixing weight problems enormously reduces [the] threat of different illnesses, particularly diabetes, and improves high quality of life. We do have to discover a approach to make urge for food inhibitors out there to anybody who needs them,” Sanders mentioned on Tuesday, quoting the Tesla CEO from earlier this month. “And Mr. Musk is correct.”
The centibillionaire has repeatedly clashed with the senator over earnings inequality, with Musk as soon as posting how he retains forgetting Sanders isn’t useless but. But it surely’s exhausting to struggle with somebody who agrees with you.
Musk himself has waged a relentless battle with the size, having been fat-shamed by his very personal father earlier than opting to take Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy to assist slim down chemically.
“I actually am with Bernie on this one,” Musk posted on Tuesday.
74 cents of each greenback in gross sales goes to middlemen
Sanders was talking at a subcommittee listening to that referred to as Novo Nordisk CEO Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen as a witness. By the senator’s estimate, Jørgensen is charging U.S. sufferers 9 occasions what they cost German friends internet of record worth rebates.
Practically three-quarters of the income Novo Nordisk has generated from the $50 billion in complete gross sales for the reason that 2018 launch of its so-called GLP-1 drug semaglutide (marketed below the model title Ozempic and Wegovy) comes from the U.S. market, a determine Jørgensen didn’t dispute.
“The USA is Novo Nordisk’s money cow for Ozempic and Wegovy,” Sanders mentioned. “All we’re saying, Mr. Jørgensen, is deal with the American individuals the identical manner that you just deal with individuals all around the world—cease ripping us off.”
Jørgensen mentioned his firm is investing $30 billion to increase manufacturing and decrease the drug’s value.
As an alternative, he blamed pharmacy profit managers (PBMs), the middlemen who negotiate costs with clients in a U.S. healthcare system that’s incentivized to maintain prices up on the expense of affected person outcomes.
“They get a payment based mostly on record worth—so the upper record worth, the extra payment they get for a similar job,” he mentioned, including, on common, 74 cents of every greenback income Novo Nordisk makes within the U.S. results in the pockets of PBMs and insurers.
“In our expertise, merchandise that include a low record worth get much less protection. It’s much less enticing.”
When Sanders countered that he had secured a written dedication from three main PBMs that they might not decrease or drop protection of Novo Nordisk medicine if the corporate lower its record costs, the CEO was skeptical.
“That’s new info for me.” Jørgensen replied. “I don’t know below which circumstances such a promise comes. I haven’t seen any of that.”
When contacted by Fortune for remark, a spokesman for Novo Nordisk reiterated his CEO’s remark that no single firm can repair the American healthcare system alone.
Nonetheless, it seemed ahead to persevering with to work with policymakers towards “significant options” for sufferers counting on its medicines.
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