Competition and hard bargaining may be starting to cut the typical prices U.S. health plans really pay for three drugs made by Novo Nordisk that can help people lose weight.
Novo Nordisk, a Danish pharmaceutical manufacturer, introduced Ozempic, an injectable GLP-1 agonist drug that can help people lose weight but is officially licensed only for use as a treatment for diabetes, in 2018. The company introduced Wegovy, a higher-dose, injectable version of Ozempic that’s officially licensed for use as a weight-loss drug, in 2021.
The company added Rybelsus, a product based on tirzepatide, a more powerful GLP-1 agonist, in 2021. That drug is officially licensed only for use as a diabetes treatment, but it can also help people lose weight and can be taken as a pill, freeing users from the need to give themselves shots.
Today, the full list prices for the drugs are about $969 for Ozempic, $1,349 for Wegovy and $969 for Rybelsus.
But, after the effects of drug price negotiations are taken into account, the average net price that Medicare and U.S. commercial plans actually pay for a one-month supply of the drugs is now about $290 for Ozempic, $649 for Wegovy and $296 for Rybelsus, according to a new anti-obesity medication cost report prepared by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ planning and evaluation office.
Ozempic’s current price is down 9.3% from the 2023 average, and it’s down 33% from what the company was getting in 2021, when Wegovy showed up.
Wegovy now costs 22% more than it did in 2021, but it costs 2.5% less than it did in 2023.
The price of Rybelsus is 9.2% lower than it was in 2023 and 15% lower than it was in 2021.
Analysts at the HHS planning office prepared the report as another arm of HHS, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, was proposing that Medicare plans should treat obesity as a serious chronic disease in its own right, not simply a nuisance, and pay for anti-obesity medications.
“The future path of prices of drugs in this class will be affected by the number of approved conditions for each drug, whether any of the drugs are selected for price negotiation by Medicare, and the number of new drugs that become available, including potential future new entrants into the market,” planning office officials say.
Medicare has an influence on the employer health plan prescription drug market as well as the government plan market because it pays for drugs for about 55 million people, or 16% of all U.S. residents.
Methods: The HHS planning office analysts based their price trend data on figures from SSR Health, a prescription price data firm.
Many other firms provide the “wholesale acquisition cost,” or list price, of a drug.
SSR gathers data on manufacturers’ rebates and discounts and subtracts those figures from the wholesale acquisition cost figures.
Other drugs: The HHS version of the SSR anti-obesity medication data shows figures for other GLP-1 agonist drugs, such as Teva Pharmaceuticals’ Victoza and Eli Lilly’s Zepbound, as well as for Ozempic, Wegovy and Rybelsus.
The price of Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro, a diabetes-control drug that contains tirzepatide, a compound that’s believed to be more powerful than semaglutide, is still rising: It now costs $292 per month, or 21% more than it cost in 2023.