00:00Eli Lilly announcing it will cut the prices for introductory doses of ZepBound if you pay cash.
00:06This is just the latest move in the price war with Novo Nordisk that's getting more and more confusing in terms of pricing for these weight loss drugs.
00:13Joining us now to talk about it is someone who understands everything, at least in regards to this industry, Bloomberg health reporter Madison Muller.
00:22So what do we know about ZepBound? Now it's what, the five milligram doses, the starter doses are going to be even cheaper.
00:29Exactly. So the beginning doses, the starter doses, which, like you said, people sort of stay on for a month, maybe two months.
00:36This is, you know, because these drugs cause nausea and some GI side effects, people have to step up.
00:41So they can't start at the highest dose. They have to start lower and go up.
00:45So what Lilly and Novo are doing is offering some discounts on those starting doses.
00:49So Lilly is discounting the price of the first starter dose by $50 and shaving even more off of that second starter dose.
00:56And they're keeping the same prices for the higher doses.
01:00And this is sort of what we're seeing for Novo as well, which is discounting the first two months of treatment even further.
01:05A couple of weeks ago they did that.
01:07But for patients, once they get to those actual therapeutic doses that you're supposed to stay on, those prices aren't really changing much.
01:13Right. That's the key word, right? Therapeutic doses.
01:15That's the dose at which these things are proven in trials medically functioning and not the starter dose of five milligrams,
01:24the transitioning dose of seven and a half milligrams for ZetBound, for Wegovy and Ozempic.
01:29It's different, 0.25 and 0.5.
01:31But what they're trying to do, I guess, is get you in, give you a taste of the weight loss,
01:36and get you kind of stuck in it before you have to pay full dollar for the therapeutic doses.
01:42Right. And it's really hard for patients because I think even though these discounts are good for patients at the end of the day,
01:46there's a lot of confusion.
01:47I mean, I'm talking to people who are still paying the $500 for Wegovy and Ozempic when they should be paying a lot less at this point.
01:55And so hopefully the price will start to come down across the board and these discounts will be more uniform.
02:00I mean, Lilly and Novo both also struck deals with the Trump administration last month to bring down the price of these drugs starting next year.
02:08And so hopefully some of these discounts will start to be a little bit more universal.
02:11But the hard thing is that insurance coverage is still pretty patchy.
02:14And so there are a lot of insurers that don't cover these medications at the moment.
02:18And that's why Lilly and Novo are having to discount the drugs the way that they are.
02:22Also, do they want to get rid of some of the stock before someone comes out with a pill that's more popular
02:26or a shot that you only take once every three months instead of once a week?
02:30Right. I mean, that's the other thing is that pills are coming and that's going to put additional pricing pressure on this whole category.
02:35I mean, we're expecting pills probably next year.
02:38Lilly and Novo are both working on their own versions.
02:40And the starting doses of those are expected to be even lower, around $150 a month.
02:45And that's part of the Trump administration deal as well.
02:48But that's, you know, another expectation is that those will be really widely available to patients.
02:53It'll be interesting, though, because obviously the demand for these shots is really, really high.
02:57So whether or not people will switch over to the pills or whether that will open sort of a whole new market of patients sort of remains to be seen.
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