There are very few situations in which being fat is anything other than a problem with impulse control. Combined with decades of bad food science pushed by the government and the reality that the cheap food, like cheap everything else, is at the bottom of every quality pyramid, getting and staying fat is easy. Losing weight is hard.
But is your obesity someone else’s problem?
It is in coach on a discount airline, but the actual condition itself is not, so when New Hampshire announced it would no longer expect taxpayers (through Medicaid) to pay for GLP-1 drugs, I applauded.
Starting Jan. 1, New Hampshire’s Medicaid program will stop covering GLP-1 drugs — Wegovy, Zepbound, and others — for weight loss.
“We looked at the way that the state was supporting coverage for GLP-1 medicines and found that this was a fairly significant cost driver,” Gov. Kelly Ayotte told reporters on Wednesday. “And so we looked at the medically necessary reasons for it in terms of those who had pre-existing conditions and made the decision working with Health and Human Services to come up with a modified policy that will still allow medications in those circumstances, but then really make sure it is cost sustainable going forward.”
I take this to mean that, in reality, we’ll still be paying for it (medical exceptions are in abundance unless you need one), but on paper, we’re all a bunch of racists.
The Alliance for Women’s Health and Prevention wrote a letter to Ayotte Tuesday urging her to reconsider the decision. The organization noted that approximately 30% of women in New Hampshire — and a disproportionately large number of women of color — experience obesity and that obesity is associated with over 200 health complications, citing the American Medical Association and KFF. …
“People are going to be living longer with obesity, which is going to lend to any number of the other 200 comorbidities that are aligned with living with obesity,” she said. “And clearly, when you’re talking about things like diabetes and cardiovascular disease and high blood pressure and cancer and fertility issues that are specific to women, they’re going to end up with higher costs specifically related to those diseases and also specifically related to higher hospitalization costs.”
Using Millicent’s calculations, over 90,000 women in New Hampshire are on Medicaid. If 30% of them are obese, that’s around 30,000. You can fit fifty people who don’t need taxpayer-paid-for GLP-1 drugs on an MCI D4505 Greyhound bus. GLP-1 does not reduce obesity, and in most cases, weight loss is limited to 30-50 pounds. The “patient” puts it back on because GLP-1 doesn’t change their eating habits; it just reinforces the bad behavior.
If the problem is a behavior the drug can’t “fix,” Medicaid reimbursement will do nothing to reduce obesity or reduce the vectors for the 200 comorbidities associated with it. The weight loss associated with GLP-1, likewise will not likely prevent Type II Diabetes or the other complications, so for a the cost of 50,000 bus tickets to Massachusetts or New York (give or take), we can solve this problem by sending them to a state that will pay for their food stamps and their GLP-1 and offer more sociallly just state-level government heatl care that, regadless of the girth of those using it, costs at least five times what it should in the competitive marketplace the progolodytes abhor.
It is also worth noting that a lot of the people who request GLP-1 drugs are not obese. They just want to use them to secretly drop those last few pesky pounds to impress friends and family (by which I mean other women they work with). The weight that comes right back when the private or group plans they have stopped paying for it. Yes, many of the private insurance markets are already GLP-1s.
The solution is not drugs, it is diet and education, and there are literally hundreds of people creating videos about food science and eating habits that anyone with an Obamaphone can watch for free.
No, it’s not that easy, but it’s also not my problem until the government makes it mine, and I don’t think I should have to pay for a drug that aids and abets the actual problem without any hope of solving it.
Even if it’s “racist.”
