Employers cutting off insurance coverage for costly weight-loss drugs like Ozempic: report

 The extraordinary demand for pricey weight-loss drugs like Ozempic is forcing some employers to cancel insurance coverage to offset soaring bills, according to a report.

The popular drugs can cost as much as $1,350 a month for a patient taking Wegovy and Saxenda — which fall under the same class as the celebrity-fueled craze for Ozempic.

That has put a strain on some employer-funded plans, which have seen spending on coverage skyrocket into the tens of millions of dollars, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The cost has become too high for the University of Texas System, which recently announced that as of Sept. 1 it would end coverage of Wegovy and Saxenda, developed by Danish pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk to treat diabetes.

A year and a half ago, UT Systems was footing a $1.5 million monthly bill for these weight-loss shots, which mimic the actions of the GLP-1 hormone that the pancreas releases after eating to make people feel full.

Now, its monthly payment has soared over $5 million, according to the Journal.

“Continuing to dispense these medications would add an additional $73 million a year to the prescription plans, an amount that is unsustainable,” UT Systems said, noting that it would also drive up premiums by as much as 3% for all employees.

Weight-loss injections like Ozempic costs about $1,200 monthly without insurance coverage. Though it can be as cheap as $25 monthly with coverage, it costs employers millions.

REUTERS

The public university system noted that 3,200 of its workers enrolled in a benefits plan have been utilizing the coverage for Wegovy or Saxenda prescriptions — nearly 3% of its 115,000-staffer workforce.

The Post has sought comment from UT System.

Another large employer, Ascension Healthcare — the second-largest private healthcare system in the US that operates non-profit and Catholic hospitals — cut off its anti-obesity drugs including Wegovy and Saxenda July 1, according to an online notice.

The St. Louis-based healthcare provider — which employs nearly 140,000 people and operates hospitals in 19 states, primarily in the Midwest and South — didn’t immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.

Without insurance, Type 2 diabetes drug Ozempic — now better-known as a trendy, quick-fix semaglutide injection — can cost patients about $1,200 per month, according to WebMD.

“But if you’re one of the lucky ones whose insurance covers the drug, it can be much cheaper,” the site added, noting that one pre-diabetic patient whose Ozempic prescription is covered costs $25 for a 30-day supply.

The University of Michigan’s employee benefits still include coverage for the jabs, though it increased the co-pay from $20 to $45 in an effort to curb costs back in March, according to the university’s human resources site.

The University of Texas System recently announced it would stop paying for weight-loss shots Wegovy and Saxenda — drugs in the same class as Ozempic — as prescriptions were costing the company over $5 million monthly.

REUTERS

The move was designed to encourage health plan members to first try other, less expensive options.

The co-pay for less-costly phentermine tablets, for instance, is only $10 a month. 

The reimbursement cuts and other restrictions come at the expense of prevention treatments aimed to cut the costs to employers’ health plans, experts said.

“Everybody is concerned this treatment is going to add a huge cost burden on health plans,” Michael Thompson, chief executive of the National Alliance of Healthcare Purchaser Coalitions, which includes groups representing employers, told the Journal. “It’s one of the key issues employers are having to wrestle with today because of the prevalence of these medicines.” 

Ozempic and the other drugs are often covered by insurance when they’re prescribed to treat Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, which is what they were originally intended for.

But their demand has soared after patients discovered their slimming effects.

They’ve become so popular that “people with diabetes have been struggling to get their hands on it amid widespread shortages,” according to WebMD.

Ozempic has particularly exploded among people wanting to slim down after it was revealed that celebrities like Khloe Kardashian and Chelsea Handler admitting to using it.

“Americans are being prescribed the drug [Ozempic] at an extraordinary pace and make up reportedly around 10% of global prescriptions,” WebMD noted.

Elon Musk publicly proclaimed last October that he shed pounds with fasting and Wegovy.

However, the prescription drugs have also been blamed for causing a slew of detrimental — and bizarre — side effects, including “Ozempic butt,” where users are claiming that their derrières have flattened along with their tummies, and “Ozempic finger,” where finger and wrist sizes were rapidly shrinking too, causing women to fear that their engagement rings would fall off.

Novo Nordisk is the Denmark-based pharmaceutical company that makes Ozempic, Wegovy and Saxenda.

REUTERS

The latest alleged side effect is much more serious: Last month, Iceland’s health regulator flagged two cases of patients on Ozempic and one on Saxenda having suicidal and self harm-related thoughts.

One other Saxenda user reported thoughts of self-injury.

“The US healthcare system is complex and there are multiple factors which affect how chronic diseases are understood, treated and covered by insurance,” a spokesperson for Novo Nordisk told The Post. “Importantly, Novo Nordisk is committed to ensuring responsible use of our medicines.”

https://nypost.com/2023/08/02/employers-cutting-off-insurance-coverage-for-weight-loss-drugs/

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Climate alarmists falsely claim the world is literally on fire

 One of the most common tropes in our increasingly alarmist climate debate is that global warming has set the world on fire. 

But it hasn’t. 

For more than two decades, satellites have recorded fires across the planet’s surface.

The data are unequivocal: Since the early 2000s, when 3% of the world’s land caught fire, the area burned annually has trended downward. 

In 2022, the last year for which there are complete data, the world hit a record low of 2.2% burned area.

Yet you’ll struggle to find that reported anywhere. 

Flaming blips 

Instead, the media acts as if the world is ablaze.

In late 2021, The New York Times employed more than 40 staff on a project called “Postcards From a World on Fire,” headed by a photorealistic animation of the world in flames. 

Its explicit goal was to convince readers of the climate crisis’ immediacy through a series of stories of climate-change-related devastation across the world, including the 2019-20 wildfires in Australia. 

In late 2021, The New York Times employed more than 40 staff on a project called “Postcards From a World on Fire,” headed by a photorealistic animation of the world in flames.

AP

This summer, the focus has been on Canada’s wildfires, the smoke from which covered large parts of the Northeastern US.

Both the Canadian prime minister and the White House have blamed climate change. 

Yet the latest report by the United Nations’ climate panel doesn’t attribute the area burned globally by wildfires to climate change. 

Instead, it vaguely suggests the weather conditions that promote wildfires are becoming more common in some places. 

This summer, the focus has been on Canada’s wildfires, the smoke from which covered large parts of the Northeastern US.

Erik Pendzich/Shutterstock

Still, the report finds that the change in these weather conditions won’t be detectable above the natural noise even by the end of the century. 

The Biden administration and the Times can paint a convincing picture of a fiery climate apocalypse because they selectively focus on the parts of the world that are on fire, not the much larger area where fires are less prevalent. 

Take the Canadian wildfires this summer.

While the complete data aren’t in for 2023, global tracking up to July 29 by the Global Wildfire Information System shows that more land has burned in the Americas than usual. 

But much of the rest of the world has seen lower burning — Africa and especially Europe. 

Globally, the GWIS shows that burned area is slightly below the average between 2012 and 2022, a period that already saw some of the lowest rates of burned area. 

The thick smoke from the Canadian fires that blanketed New York City and elsewhere was serious but only part of the story. 

Across the world, fewer acres burning each year has led to overall lower levels of smoke, which today likely prevents almost 100,000 infant deaths annually, according to a recent study by researchers at Stanford and Stockholm University. 

Apocalypse Not 

Likewise, while Australia’s wildfires in 2019-20 earned media headlines such as “Apocalypse Now” and “Australia Burns,” the satellite data show this was a selective narrative.

The burning was extraordinary in two states but extraordinarily small in the rest of the country. 

Since the early 2000s, when 8% of Australia caught fire, the area of the country torched each year has declined.

The 2019-20 fires scorched 4% of Australian land, and this year the burned area will likely be even less. 

The report however finds that the change in these weather conditions won’t be detectable above the natural noise even by the end of the century. 

ZUMAPRESS.com

That didn’t stop the media from cherry-picking. 

They ran with a study from the World Wildlife Fund that found the 2019-20 fires impacted — meaning took habitat or food from, subjected to heat stress, killed or injured, among other things — 3 billion animals. 

But this study looked mostly at the two states with the highest burning, not the rest of Australia. Nationally, wildfires likely killed or harmed 6 billion animals in 2019-20.

That’s near a record low; in the early 2000s fires harmed or killed 13 billion animals annually. 

A cheaper solution 

It’s embarrassingly wrong to claim, as climate scientist Michael Mann did recently, that climate policy is the “only way” to reduce fires.

Prescribed burning, improved zoning and enhanced land management are much faster, more effective and cheaper solutions for fires than climate policy. 

Environmental Protection Agency modeling showed that even with a drastic reduction in emissions it would take 50 to 80 years before we’d see a small impact in the area burned in the US. 

In the case of American fires, most of the problem is bad land management.

A century of fire suppression has left more fuel for stronger fires.

Even so, last year, US fires burned less than one-fifth of the average burn in the 1930s and likely only one-tenth of what caught fire in the early 20th century. 

Doom and bust 

When reading headlines about fires, remember the other climate scare tactics that proved duds.

Polar bears were once the poster cubs for climate action, yet are now estimated to be more populous than at any time in the past half-century. 

We were told climate change would produce more hurricanes, yet satellite data shows that the number of hurricanes globally since 1980 has trended slightly downward. 

Global warming is a real challenge.

Over the next century the costs associated will be the equivalent of one or two recessions.

The common-sense response would be to recognize that both climate change and carbon-cutting policies incur costs, then negotiate a balance that puts the most effective measures first. 

Surveys repeatedly show that most voters are unwilling to support the very expensive climate policies activists and green politicians have proposed.

Overheated headlines about climate Armageddon are an attempt to scare us into supporting them anyway, at the cost of sensible discussion and debate. 

Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus, a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and author of “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.” 

https://nypost.com/2023/08/01/climate-change-is-not-the-reason-for-the-rise-of-wildfires/

In The Decade Before Crime Rose, "Broken Windows" Policing Stopped

 Charles Murray is the F.A. Hayek chair emeritus in cultural studies at the American Enterprise Institute. This article was adapted from his AEI working paper “The Collapse of Broken-Windows Policing in New York City, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC, 2013-22.”

George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer on May 25, 2020, was followed in many places across the country by protest marches and riots. The Black Lives Matter movement mushroomed in size, funding and influence. Mayors of some major cities pilloried police and urged slashing their budgets.

In the ensuing months, especially as pandemic lockdowns eased, urban crime became more intrusive. Rampant shoplifting forced the closure of many stores, large and small. In a group of 34 of the largest U.S. cities, homicides surged 30 percent in 2020. Daily life in some cities evoked the menace and decay of New York City in the 1970s and 1980s.

The timing of this crime rise led to a widespread impression that Floyd’s murder and its immediate aftermath had marked a break point in urban crime. I shared that impression and set out to test it by looking closely at crime data for three major cities: New York, Washington and Los Angeles.

What I found was more complicated than a change from before Floyd’s murder to after it: The time after May 2020 did see crime increases, but the preceding years — roughly a decade — paved the way.

The national crime story over the past 70 years tells of a disastrous rise in crime in the 1960s and 1970s, followed in the 1990s and 2000s by one of the great successes of social policy, a steep decline in crime. Policy analysts still argue about the reasons for that decline. I will not try to adjudicate the competing claims made for changes in policing, increased incarceration, or economic and cultural factors. But it is a fact that the progress occurred after many large cities, including New York, Los Angeles and Washington, had adopted a new public safety philosophy: broken-windows policing.

“Broken windows” refers to the argument that making arrests for minor offenses heads off a sense of lawlessness that invites serious crime. These offenses are ones for which police could make an arrest but ones they can instead choose to ignore depending on the circumstances — offenses that don’t physically harm anyone or steal property but are insults to public order.

New York, Los Angeles and Washington have posted online databases containing raw data for each arrest made in those cities from 2013 through 2022. I used that information to count arrests for eight categories of offenses that are especially targeted by broken-windows policing: vandalism, theft of services (such as turnstile-jumping), vagrancy, public drunkenness, lewd behavior, prostitution and solicitation thereof, loitering and disorderly conduct. To ensure that all these qualified as minor offenses, I included only arrests that were charged as misdemeanors, violations or infractions, excluding arrests charged as felonies.

The graph below shows the proportional change in the number of those arrests using 2013 as the baseline.

In New York and Los Angeles, the fall in arrests for broken-windows offenses was steep and steady from 2013 to 2020. Washington is different, with a sudden rise in broken-windows arrests in 2019. The anomaly was created entirely by a one-year spike in arrests for prostitution and solicitation, the result of a policy decision to clear the streets of sex workers near hotels. If arrests for prostitution and solicitation are deleted from the Washington data, the trendline of broken-windows offenses shows the same uninterrupted decline as the trendlines for New York and Los Angeles.

As of 2022, arrests for broken-windows offenses since 2013 had fallen by 74 percent in New York, 77 percent in Washington and 81 percent in Los Angeles. There was no apparent “Floyd effect” in New York or Los Angeles. A case for a small effect can be made for Washington. It should be noted that during the same period, reported major crimes known as FBI index crimes declined only slightly in New York and Washington, and rose in Los Angeles.

The collapse of broken-windows policing was accompanied by a broader retreat from law enforcement in all three cities for felonies as well as misdemeanors.

Consider how Los Angeles has applied California’s “flash incarceration” law, which allows probation or parole officers to impose a jail sentence of one to 10 days for probation or parole violations, thereby serving as an immediate, unappealable punishment. It is a direct expression of broken-windows theory. In 2013-2014, Los Angeles used flash incarceration 4,858 times; by 2021-2022, its use had dropped 99 percent. The city also virtually stopped arresting people for vagrancy (down 98 percent), failure to appear in court (down 98 percent) and contempt of court (down 91 percent).

Among the other crimes that had large reductions in arrests, theft stands out. It isn’t just that Los Angeles police stopped arresting shoplifters, signified by a 78 percent reduction in arrests for petty theft. Arrests for the FBI index crime of larceny dropped by two-thirds.

Arrest records in New York during that period also show dramatic declines. The top three categories, all with reductions in arrests above 90 percent, had broken-windows implications (disorderly conduct; prostitution and solicitation; theft of services), as did the fourth, trespassing (down 89 percent), as did drug-related offenses (down 86 percent) and traffic violations (down 76 percent).

The only FBI index crime that saw substantially reduced arrests in New York was rape (down 45 percent). Otherwise, New York arrest patterns for major crimes did not change appreciably even as its enforcement of minor offenses plunged.

That cannot be said for Washington, which saw large reductions of arrests for five of the seven serious FBI index crimes. Arrests for robbery and larceny were both down 67 percent. Arrests fell by 59 percent for aggravated assault, 49 percent for burglary and 40 percent for rape. Except for aggravated assault, these figures were mitigated by fewer reported offenses, but the net reductions in arrests for robbery (down 33 percent) and larceny (down 59 percent) suggest substantially reduced policing.

Not surprisingly, arrests in Washington for offenses with strong broken-windows implications during that period crashed as well. They occupied the top three slots for the largest declines in arrests: prostitution and solicitation (down 97 percent), vagrancy (down 93 percent) and public drinking (down 93 percent).

Many explanations can be offered for the collapse of broken-windows policing in these three major U.S. cities, but the effects are not complicated or subtle. The daily quality of life of Americans living in much of New York, Los Angeles and Washington has suffered. Boarded-up stores, vandalism and people sleeping on the streets have increased along with smaller indignities of life in these neighborhoods — public drinking and drug use, omnipresent graffiti, intimidation of passersby.

These costs of ending broken-windows policing are not borne by people in affluent suburbs or rich urban neighborhoods. They are disproportionately borne by urbanites who are minorities or have modest incomes, or both. If improving their lives is the goal, then restoring broken-windows policing should be part of the solution.

https://broken-windows-policing.tiiny.co/