Obesity drugs would be covered by Medicare and Medicaid under Biden proposal

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

65% : Medicare and Medicaid already cover the drugs for certain patients with diabetes and cardiac disease, and will add other ailments over time as the Food and Drug Administration approves their use.
59% : Medicare will also be able to negotiate on the price for Wegovy starting next year, under legislation passed during the Biden administration that allows the program to lower the prices of popular drugs.
54% : And Trump has nominated two figures to key health posts who have differing views about the value of the new drugs, known as GLP-1s.
54% : CMS estimates that coverage will cost the federal government about $25 billion for Medicare and $11 billion for Medicaid over a decade; states would pay around $4 billion for their share of the Medicaid bill, according to Brooks-LaSure.
51% : The new obesity drugs, including Wegovy from Novo Nordisk and Zepbound from Eli Lilly, have been shown to improve health in numerous ways, but legislation passed 20 years ago prevents Medicare from covering drugs for "weight loss."The new proposal sidesteps that restriction, specifying that the drugs would be covered to treat the disease of obesity and prevent its related conditions.
48% : CMS estimates that around 3.4 million more patients in Medicare would become eligible for obesity drugs, and around 4 million patients in Medicaid would gain coverage, costing the programs billions of dollars.
47% : "We don't want to see people having to wait until they have these additional diseases before they get treatment," said Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, noting the growing medical consensus that obesity is a chronic health condition.
47% : That price for Medicare is lower than a recent estimate from the Congressional Budget Office, and one published by researchers in the policy journal Health Affairs.
35% : Medicare covers Americans 65 and older; Medicaid covers poor and disabled Americans.
20% : The Biden administration, in one of its last major policy directives, will propose that Medicare and Medicaid cover obesity medications, a costly and probably popular move that the Trump administration would need to endorse to become official.

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