Outgoing US President Joe Biden on Tuesday proposed giving millions of Americans access to weight-loss drugs – but Donald Trump’s incoming health chief looked set to shoot down the idea.
Under Medicare and Medicaid, the giant U.S. public health insurance programs, drugs like Ozempic and Vegovi are, for the most part, available only to overweight people with diabetes or heart disease.
But the White House said Biden wants to make the game-changing drugs widely available as obesity treatments — expanding coverage to about 7.5 million older and low-income Americans.
A White House official said, “For too many Americans, these vital treatments are too expensive and therefore out of reach.” He said that 42 percent of Americans are obese.
Separately, the Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement that “transformative medicines” would improve the “health and quality of life” of millions of people living with obesity.
The move will benefit 3.4 million Americans with Medicare, which primarily provides health insurance to people over the age of 65. Officials said it would also help the four million people eligible for assistance with Medicaid, which targets low-income residents.
But given that Trump’s incoming health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., having previously spoken out against the use of anti-obesity drugs, said the last-gasp plan is unlikely to stick.
In October Kennedy opposed a separate bill in Congress that would have expanded access to drugs, saying that the money needed to do so would be better spent on improving nutrition.
Kennedy said on Fox News, “If we spent about one-fifth of that giving every man, woman and child in our country a good meal, three meals a day, we could solve the obesity and diabetes epidemics overnight. Are.”
‘so stupid’
He accused the Danish makers of Ozempic and Vegov, Novo Nordisk, of “relying on selling it to the Americans, because we are so stupid and addicted to drugs.”
Kennedy has attracted great controversy for his anti-vaccine activism and embrace of conspiracy theories — but some of his proposals to improve Americans’ diets have won praise from health campaigners and lawmakers.
Any plan to increase US public health insurance spending would likely run counter to Trump’s effort to reduce government budget spending and waste.
Trump said last week when he appointed celebrity TV doctor Mehmet Oz to head Medicare and Medicaid that Oz would “cut waste and fraud” in “our nation’s most expensive government agency.”
Republicans have also nominated tech tycoon Elon Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy to lead a so-called “government efficiency” commission to cut costs across the government.
Biden has taken a different approach during his only term in office.
The Democrat has led a major campaign to reduce the exorbitant costs of U.S. prescription drugs, and his success in forcing pharmaceutical giants to lower prices on some drugs will be reflected in his re-election campaign before he drops out in July. Had become a major issue.
In July, Biden called on Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly to lower the prices of diabetes and weight-loss drugs and said the companies should stop “defrauding the American people.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
