What To Know About Tirzepatide And Similar Weight Loss Drugs

The retail price for liraglutide (Saxenda) and semaglutide (Wegovy) injector pens is around $1,700 per month for uninsured patients in the United States. That’s a little over $20,000 per year.

The type 2 diabetes formulations of these medications also have high price tags, though they are significantly lower. The retail price for Ozempic (the version of semaglutide for people with type 2 diabetes) and Mounjaro (the brand name for tirzepatide) is about $1,100, or about $600 less per month.

With Johnson’s insurance, her copayments have been $50 per month. She covers half of this with a savings card provided by the manufacturer.

“I’m incredibly fortunate to have good insurance as well as the finances to cover the higher co-pay if I needed to do so,” she said.

Some insurance companies won’t cover some GLP-1 agonists. For example, Medicare and most insurance companies won’t cover Wegovy, according to GoodRx. An app called Calibrate offers personalized coaching and access to physician-prescribed GLP-1 agonists for $1,649 per year or $138 per month. That is in addition to the cost of medications, but on its website, Calibrate claims to work with users’ insurance companies to get them covered. It also guarantees weight loss of 10% or more. (Calibrate did not respond to a request to comment by the time of publication.)

Irrespective of the cost, new prescriptions of Wegovy have been temporarily halted. Novo Nordisk, the manufacturer of both Wegovy and Ozempic, has had to shift its production schedule in the face of its third-party vendor’s shortage of needle pens used to deliver the medicine. In order to continue serving patients who are already taking Wegovy, Novo Nordisk is currently only producing the two highest doses, 1.7mg and 2.4mg, and the company has said it hopes to be able to fulfill the increasing demand for Wegovy by the second half of 2022.

Because of the Wegovy shortage, and because Ozempic is priced much lower, some patients have sought off-label prescriptions of the type 2 diabetes medicine from their doctors. However, Dr. Jason Brett, Novo Nordisk’s executive director of medical affairs for diabetes and obesity, is insistent that healthcare providers should not be prescribing the medications interchangeably.

“The active pharmaceutical ingredient is the same, semaglutide, but they have different doses, they have different dose escalation schedules, and they have different devices,” he said.

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