State Health Plan ask for public's help in lowering cost of weight-loss drugs
The North Carolina State Health Plan is asking the public for help in lowering the cost of weight-loss drugs, issuing a formal request Monday for ideas from the marketplace.
“We are hopeful that someone or some company will help us find an affordable way to offer these drugs to our members,” State Treasurer Dale Folwell, who chairs the health plan's board and whose office oversees the plan, said in a statement.
The plan’s board of trustees voted 4-3 in January to end coverage of GLP-1 drugs such as Wegovy and Saxenda for the purpose of weight loss starting April 1, citing their high cost.
About 740,000 state employees and their family members get their health care through the State Health Plan. Plan officials have said that even though just 23,000 members of the State Health Plan are on the drugs, they’re so expensive that continued coverage — and a predicted rise in demand — would have forced the plan to double its monthly premiums on many members.
Plan spending on the two medications was projected to exceed $170 million in 2024, jumping to more than $1 billion over the next six years, Folwell said.
Folwell took aim at Novo Nordisk, which makes Wegovy and Saxenda, suggesting that the company and other manufacturers are charging too much. Folwell says the State Health Plan has been seeking lower prices in negotiations with the Danish drugmaker. But those talks have been unproductive, Folwell said.
“We are trying everything we can to be able to provide these drugs to the members of the plan that need them the most,” Folwell said. “All we are asking is to be treated fairly and not to be price-gouged by the manufacturers.”
Representatives of Novo Nordisk didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment Monday.
Earlier this month the company told WRAL it had provided state officials with several negotiation offers. “We are surprised and disappointed North Carolina rejected multiple, workable options presented to them since the last Board meeting in January,” the company said at the time. “Instead, State Health Plan officials are abandoning their obligation to employees living with the chronic disease of obesity and denying them coverage for safe and effective treatments. Denying patients insurance coverage for important and effective FDA approved treatments is simply irresponsible.”
