'Ozempic economy' explained as research suggests drug could save US taxpayers $173,000,000,000 a year
Britt Jones
Featured Image Credit: Getty Images/Steve Christo - Corbis
Drugs like Ozempic have been hailed as a saver of money for US taxpayers, and the reason may surprise you.
Ozempic has been the subject of media attention over the last few years after range of celebrities - including the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Amanda Bynes - and opened up about using the drug for weight-loss purposes.
The weekly injection helps to lower blood sugar levels in the body by assisting helping to produce more insulin.
Since celebs began to open up about just how it helped them to manage their weight, regular people began to use it in droves.
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Ozempic was approved in the US back in 2017 for use in adults with Type-2 diabetes, and while it isn't approved for weight loss, it doesn’t stop people from using it for that purpose anyway.
Fellow jabs Wegovy and Mounjaro, on the other hand, are both approved for weight-loss.
Anyway, now that the craze has died down (apparently), there has been some surprising results which have come from the popular drug and now it’s saving taxpayers’ money and businesses alike.
According to the Queen’s Business Review, it’s now an economic anchor.
This is because it helps people to lose weight... stay with me here.
While the review notes that people have gained back the weight they initially shed after they stopped using the drug, the weight loss Ozempic promotes is what could be a great thing for the economy, and business.
It shared the views of Professor Joseph Trunzo at the Bryant’s School of Health and Behavioral Sciences that: "There are many things that lead to people's behaviours around eating, and there’s no one treatment that will address all that."
Obviously, Ozempic isn’t a cure, but it does help a lot of people to change the way that they view eating and their habits.
So, how does it save money?
According to the outlet, ‘the financial cost of treating obesity is high, especially when accounting for the illnesses it can cause such as hypertension, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and cancer’.
Annual medical costs for these things to the healthcare system is over $173 billion, as per federal calculations.
It also shared that employee productivity is also an indirect cost of obesity as the disease might lead to employees needing to take time off work, or losing productivity.
It claimed that this would make workplaces less financially productive due to obesity thanks to high costs of disability benefit payments and training costs for those who have physical constraints.
Global Data revealed that the New York state economy data shows that obesity costs $37.3 billion in reduced economic activity and has also led to 165,000 less employees in the workforce because they may not be able to work in some workplace conditions.
Ozempic could help with his as a study by Goldman Sachs found that the mass-adoption of GLP-1 series drugs could allow for large-scale economic growth and increase the United States Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 0.4 per cent.
UNILAD has contacted Novo Nordisk for comment.