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Amid rising concern about the potential long-term costs of using glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) agonists to treat obesity, some insurers are making access to bariatric surgery easier.
While the relationship may not be entirely causal, data do suggest that at least for now, these new agents for treating obesity including semaglutide (Wegovy) and tirzepatide (Zepbound) are not cost-effective, whereas the surgery is.
According to GoodRx, Wegovy (semaglutide) has a list price of about $1350 for a 28-day supply. And the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery (ASMBS) said that the average cost of bariatric surgery ranges between $17,000 and $26,000. But ASMBS added that third-party payers will recover those costs within 2-4 years due to reduction or elimination of obesity-related conditions and associated treatment costs, with an approximate 29% healthcare cost reduction at 5 years.
Recently, for example, Geisinger Health of Pennsylvania and Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Massachusetts expanded body mass index (BMI) eligibility for bariatric surgery procedures, while Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan dropped prior authorization requirements for several services, including bariatric surgery.
While most major health insurers cover Wegovy for obesity treatment, they typically require prior authorization and/or trials of other therapies first. Recently, some employers have denied coverage for the medications for treating obesity. Medicare does not cover these drugs. Coverage varies across state Medicaid plans.
“For years, insurers…have played games with the surgery, making people jump through hoops, hoping that they would just give up and go away. And now that health plans are getting concerned about [the cost of] drugs for obesity, and they’re getting so much attention, they’re thinking oh, maybe we shouldn’t be playing these games anymore,” obesity policy expert Ted Kyle, RPh, founder of ConscienHealth, told Medscape Medical News.
However, Christopher Doubet Still, DO, director of Nutrition and Weight Management at Geisinger Medical Center, Danville, Pennsylvania, told Medscape Medical News that Geisinger Health Plan’s change in May 2023 to lower the BMI surgery eligibility cutoff from 35 kg/m2 to 30 kg/m2 for people with comorbidities was not related to the cost of GLP-1 drugs.
“To date, bariatric surgery remains the most effective, enduring treatment of obesity, and most importantly, its comorbid medical problems. So that was really the reasoning. The weight loss is secondary to the profound medical benefits of bariatric surgery. I think that was the impetus of that change, not having really anything to do at the time with GLP-1s,” Still said.
The Geisinger Health Plan does not currently cover antiobesity medications, although Geisinger Health Plan Family, a state Medicaid plan, does because Pennsylvania is now one of a handful of states that cover the medications through Medicaid.
The Equation Keeps Changing
Health economist James Chambers, PhD, of Tufts University, Boston, Massachusetts, told Medscape Medical News, “when you think about the value of a treatment, you don’t look at it in isolation. You’re looking at the difference in cost and benefits. So now that you have these expensive drugs, it’s not that surgeries become less expensive, but it does make you interpret the cost differently. When diet and exercise and counseling were the only real options, surgeries seemed like a much more expensive intervention. But with the advent of the GLP-1s, then, maybe plans consider the costs of surgery a little bit differently.”
And that equation is likely to change further, Still noted.
“I just think we’re dealing with a short-term financial problem because there’s basically only two main medications so the prices are high, but as more medications come on the market, the prices will come down,” he said.
Cristy Gallagher, MPAff, research project director of the STOP Obesity Alliance at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University, Washington, DC, agreed.
“We have a lot of data on obesity treatment coverage from before 2023. But then this [GLP-1] explosion happened in 2023…The health payers are out there trying to figure out coverage, and they’re trying to figure out what this is going to look like for them,” Gallagher said.
However, she pointed out, “there is no treatment that fits everyone. The GLP-1s won’t work for every person because of the different stages of obesity, the side effects, and then because of the coverage. I think that you will not see a decrease in bariatric surgery in the near term, by any means.”
Gallagher also noted that although the data now suggest people will have to keep taking the drugs for life, there may be other future approaches.
“Once a person hits their goal weight, maybe then they could be transferred to a different pill form that might be cheaper, something that’s sort of more of a maintenance drug. I think that is a huge unknown right now,” she said.
And Kyle said that while bariatric surgery does provide the most durable benefit, “weight regain after surgery is a fact of life. People are still healthier 5 years later, but they do have some weight regain. And in those cases, you might want to follow-up with medicines…It’s not necessarily an either/or proposition any more than surgical treatment of cancer, surgical oncology is an either/or with medical oncology.”
A New View of Obesity
According to Kyle, all this attention on the new medications “is prompting people to rethink or think differently about obesity and consider it more carefully as a chronic medical condition and not a condition of appearance and behavior. And that’s all good, whether you’re thinking about it from the standpoint of bariatric surgery or from the standpoint of medical treatment of obesity because then people start considering options more rationally.”
This shifting view of obesity has meant that bariatric surgeons and medical obesity specialists are starting to work more collaboratively, he said.
“There is a trend that I detect toward more integrated approaches to obesity,” Kyle said.
He added, “We now have more tools. And we’re in the messy middle of figuring out how, as a practical matter, to use them.”
And as far as insurance coverage, “people are going to make mistakes. They are making mistakes. But I have been the eternal optimist, and I have faith that people are also figuring it out. It would be hard to do worse.”
For now, any initiatives to increase bariatric surgery rates in the GLP-1 era haven’t yet had an impact, American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery President Marina S. Kurian, MD, told Medscape Medical News in a statement.
“While we have heard of some insurers possibly changing their requirements for bariatric surgery, we have not seen a significant rise in procedures related to changes in insurance coverage for either antiobesity medications or metabolic and bariatric surgery,” Kurian said.
Kyle had accepted speaking or professional fees from Novo Nordisk, Behringer Ingelheim, Nutrisystem, Roman Health, and Emerald Lake Safety. Still was on the speaker’s bureau and did clinical trials for Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk. Chambers and Gallager had no disclosures.
Miriam E. Tucker is a freelance journalist based in the Washington, DC, area. She is a regular contributor to Medscape Medical News, with other work appearing in the Washington Post, NPR’s Shots blog, and Diatribe. She is on X: @MiriamETucker.
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