A Boring Dystopia
Pictures, Videos, Articles showing just how boring it is to live in a dystopic society, or with signs of a dystopic society.
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its uniquely astronomical prescription drug pricing
lol, what multiverse version of the US has this writer been living in? There is nothing remotely unique about the astronomical price. It's just that these drugs treat such an extremely common problem that the astronomical price has raised more awareness than it typically does for other drugs. Just look up "orphan drugs" and I'm sure it won't be long before prices in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars get mentioned.
The antecedent of "its" is America, not the drug
FFS It's a Diabetes drug, give it to the people who actually need it, not people who just want it to lose weight easy. I know multiple diabetics and according to them, this one is seriously gamechanging for maintaining blood sugar.
It pisses me off to hear about shortages caused by people being prescribed it to shed a few pounds.
There is no shortage. It's available to anyone who wants to pay for it.
Can no one else manufacture semaglutide?
it's a short synthetic peptide with unnatural aminoacids, sure in principle you could make it in completely automated way on SPPS but this is so expensive it's really for research only. on scale you'd need normal wet synthesis, bucket scale or bigger and this is where things get tricky, especially purificationS and many of them, each intermediate needs one; then analysis and qc of it all. on top of that account for sourcing or synthesis of all these weird bits that you need, including multiple vendors and second options so that nothing gets halted because you're out of some basic reagent or solvent
this shit is hard but also it's opposite of career killer. i'm specifically not complaining
In the US, the estimated net price (after rebates) of Wegovy is $809 per month. In Denmark, the price is $186 per month. A study by researchers at Yale estimated that drugs like Wegovy can be profitably manufactured for less than $5 per month.
Meanwhile an MBA somewhere is like, "And leave 800 bucks on the table? NEVER."
I'll tell you something else that will bankrupt the healthcare system: obesity.
Here's an easy solution: send the bill to those who caused the obesity epidemic and the need for expensive weight loss drugs in the first place: the agro industry. Slap a moderate tax on any heavily processed food (that is, the vast majority of the food sold in the US) and you'll fund the weight loss drug free for everyone ten times over.
Hmmm, your idea doesn’t fuck over poor people to help rich people make more money. It’ll never work.
Worry not too much. Over at r/Ozempic, It's mostly just a bunch of fat people posting still-fat pictures of themselves.
For example:
"I used to be 310lbs, and now I'm 280!"
Bankrupting the insurance industry sounds like a good start to me. I saw a similar article in which fast food executives were fretting about reduced sales due to ozempic. I wonder what other industries are vulnerable to reduced sales volume due to fewer fat Americans? Probably knee doctors.