A new analysis estimates that losing as little as 5% weight can lead to substantial savings in health care costs elsewhere.
The advent of Ozempic, Wegovy, and other weight loss drugs could lighten people’s medical bills elsewhere. New research published this week shows that when people lose weight, their health care costs often decline along with it.
While obesity isn’t necessarily unhealthy in of itself, it can raise the risk of many other health problems, including knee pain, type 2 diabetes, and obstructive sleep apnea. Previous research has suggested that these obesity-related conditions not only take a toll on our health, but our wallets. A 2021 study, for instance, estimated that obesity in the U.S.with $260 billion in annual health care costs, as of 2016.
‘In this cross-sectional study, projected annual savings from weight loss among US adults with obesity were substantial for both Medicare and employer-based insurance,” the researchers wrote in their paper,The team’s findings do largely come from people who lost weight long before these newer GLP-1 drugs were even around. Ozempic was first approved as a diabetes drug in 2017, for instance, but it wasn’t widely prescribed off-label to treat obesity until after the approval of Wegovy in 2021 .
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