Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Do we need the Government to help fund Wegovy?

Heather du Plessis-Allan Drive

From today, Wegovy is available on our shelves so you can get skinny like Oprah, if you want.

But it'll cost you - $500 per month. Which is unaffordable for most people, prompting a debate over whether the Government should fund it to reduce obesity and safe money on obesity-related illnesses and injuries.

Now on principle, this is the kind of thing I'm a fan of - a bit of money upfront to save lots of money later. But unfortunately, as it stands, this wouldn't be an example of saving money.

If we were funding Wegovy like they do in the UK, we'd fund it for people with a BMI over 30. In New Zealand, that is a staggering 1.5 million adults, apparently.

If every one of those adults cost $500 per month, that would cost $7.5 billion per year - but it would only save $2 billion a year in obesity-related healthcare costs.

Now, that's only measuring health costs directly related to obesity. As we know, carrying too much weight makes you prone to illness, which means you take more days off work, making you less productive. So you could also add in the cost of lost productivity across the workforce.

That's around $8 billion, so that takes the cost of obesity to $9.5 billion. But measuring productivity is a guessing game - so you're paying $7.5 billion to maybe save $9.5 billion. Which isn't enough of a saving to take that punt on.

And then you need to factor in that for a lot of people, Wegovy only works while you're on it. When you're off it, you'll start putting the weight back on. So you might fund it for a lot of people, only to end up paying the cost of obesity-related illnesses later on.

Having said that, that's not measuring the cost of a life. We fund a lot of drugs just to keep people alive, so maybe we should fund this to keep people alive.

The good news is - Wegovy comes off its patent in January. Which means copy-cats will be made for much, much cheaper.

Which might change the maths, but for now, if you’re giving it to everyone who might need it, the cost would simply be too much to justify.

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