North Carolina chose to cover obesity drugs for its poor, but not its own employees

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

63% : Medicaid has certain price advantages when it comes to drugs.
49% : "This class of drug is not a quote-unquote problem because of the price, per se," said Benedic N. Ippolito, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, who recently published a paper on the possible costs of GLP-1 drugs if Medicare embraced them.
47% : " North Carolina is not the first state to cover GLP-1 drugs in Medicaid, but others have done so more tentatively, often establishing complicated rules and barriers to care.
46% : Fewer doctors tend to accept Medicaid than other kinds of insurance, and its patients often struggle to get complex medical care.
44% : And because its costs are split between state and federal governments, the state's share of the price is much lower in Medicaid than it is for state workers.
39% : Medicare, which provides prescription drug coverage for Americans older than 65, is banned by law from paying for drugs just for weight loss.
32% : A few months ago, her doctor wrote her a prescription for Wegovy, and Medicaid rejected it.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.