Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GLP-1s are breaking life insurance

glp1digest.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 640 posts

Re: GLP-1s are breaking life insurance

#291

Post by DrillShopper »

jstummbillig wrote: post #154
DrillShopper wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi there - Mounjaro user here. I've been using it for about a year at this point. I feel sick for three days in a row after taking it. Even after several months on the same dose. I get horrible gut cramps, sour stomach, near constant nausea, and occasionally vomiting and diarrhea. I have to take my shot on Thursday night because I'll feel bad the next day and supremely sick the next two days. If I took it earlier or…

I mean no offense, but you have a fairly substantiated body of evidence that something in the medication is causing the weight loss. The side effects do sound really shitty though.

The effects of the drug have helped me lose weight in two ways - one intentionally and one as a side effect.

The medication does make me feel fuller faster, so I eat less when I do eat, and I stay fuller longer. This helps me lose weight because it reduces the number of calories I consume.

The side effects make me feel so sick in those days after that I am effectively fasting all day (I have a small dinner, but keep drinking water so I don't dehydrate). That helps in losing weight.

That said, my original comment was meant slightly tongue in cheek - I know it is effective, but sometimes it's kind of darkly funny to think feeling bad from it is having the highest impact.

Re: GLP-1s are breaking life insurance

#292

Post by loeg »

dooglius wrote: post #211
hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just reporting my cached knowledge of people saying they experienced some adverse side effects. Also injections are not fun, even though they are probably a lot less annoying than they look.

There's an auto-injector mechanism, at least with my brand; you don't need to needle yourself

These tend to cost more than self-injecting. Maybe your insurance covers it and you don't care.

Re: GLP-1s are breaking life insurance

#293

Post by saratogacx »

ahartmetz wrote: post #268
dooglius wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an auto-injector mechanism, at least with my brand; you don't need to needle yourself

Ah, auto-injectors, a curious piece of technology. I've always wondered how it is to actually use one since we had these in everyone's medkit in the German army, loaded with nerve agent antidotes. Just slam it on you leg and inject through the pants were the instructions... Kinda grisly, I guess it's less emotionally charged for a weight loss drug!

For drugs like these it isn't that different from a normal injection.

The pen has about 4 doses in it so you twist it to set your dose. You attach a needle tip to the pen and give yourself a poke, press an inject button on the top and a spring loaded ratchet system pumps in the dose amount you set (making a wonderful ticking noise as it progresses). Pull out and toss the needle and put it back in the fridge for next week.

I do manual injection which involves doing the full prep work. It takes about 3x as long to setup but is still only about a 3-5 minute process in total.

Re: GLP-1s are breaking life insurance

#294

Post by DrillShopper »

schwartzworld wrote: post #160
DrillShopper wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi there - Mounjaro user here. I've been using it for about a year at this point. I feel sick for three days in a row after taking it. Even after several months on the same dose. I get horrible gut cramps, sour stomach, near constant nausea, and occasionally vomiting and diarrhea. I have to take my shot on Thursday night because I'll feel bad the next day and supremely sick the next two days. If I took it earlier or…

I’m curious what your diet is like, especially at the end of the week when the medicine is weakest. If I eat dairy, sugar, etc in the day or two before my semaglutide, I feel similarly.

It's typically a salad for lunch, usually lean protein over a complex carb for dinner (latest this week was slow cooked pulled chicken over brown rice), and typically a piece of fruit and a hard boiled egg for breakfast.

The hardest part about this diet for me has been finding sources of protein that get me at my goal with the small sizes of the meals I do eat.

Re: GLP-1s are breaking life insurance

#295

Post by loeg »

zer00eyz wrote: post #171
hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #23

So... There's a miracle drug powerful enough to robustly lower people's all cause mortality, but since health insurance and life insurance are industries with vastly different time preferences, this is not a good thing for the life insurers because people just keep getting off the magic longevity drug and screwing up their predictions. Because, admittedly, it kind of sucks in the moment to be on. And I'm guessing jus…

> And I'm guessing just based on my own experience paying for term life that the actual premia differences aren't actually enough in most cases for the life insurer to simply pay out of pocket themselves; the differences probably add up to a few hundred per year per customer, whereas a year's worth of a GLP-1 agonist probably costs a couple thousand (for now, in 2025, and probably dropping rapidly). I wonder why life…

Because metformin is super unpleasant.

Re: GLP-1s are breaking life insurance

#296

Post by toomuchtodo »

tempestn wrote: post #287
toomuchtodo wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once daily pills will very likely replace injections in the near future. Eli Lilly will soon release key data on its weight loss pill orforglipron - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43465346 - March 2025 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orforglipron

There's already Rybelsus. It's a bit more of a pain though as it needs to be taken on an empty stomach and you then need to wait 30-60 minutes before eating.

Looks like the benefit of orforglipron is you can take it whether you’ve eaten or not.

Re: GLP-1s are breaking life insurance

#297

Post by [deleted] »

arp242 wrote: post #215
romaaeterna wrote: post #16

The problem (not new with GLP-1s) is that people lose weight, get life insurance, and then regain. The biggest part of that equation is regain part. Most people quit GLP-1s because of costs. Let's fix that.

Are the long-term (>20 years) effects of taking GLP-1s really all that well understood? Because that's kind of what you're suggesting here. Making millions of people dependent on a drug to maintain basic health does not strike me as the best of ideas regardless. I understand why it's a good idea for many from an individual perspective and I'm not judging anyone, but from a societal perspective it does not seem like a…

[deleted]

Re: GLP-1s are breaking life insurance

#298

Post by saratogacx »

alistairSH wrote: post #282
yumraj wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because most users return to normal indicators within about 2 years Because they stop taking GLP-1s after 1-2 years, not, it seems, because the meds stop working.

They do? I was under the impression people stopped taking them because they’re massively expensive. And weekly injections is a bit annoying (though should be less annoying than diabetes or death or whatever else).

There is a set of the population, and not a small one, that will quit the drug as soon as they hit the weight they feel is good enough. Even if they can afford it and are used to the shots they just feel that it is done and don't feel like they'll rebound (although most do) once off it.

Re: GLP-1s are breaking life insurance

#299

Post by romaaeterna »

arp242 wrote: post #241
Spivak wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? We have an overweight and obesity epidemic that has persisted through everything else we've gotten enough political capital to try thus far. The "miracle" drug is the most promising direction we've had in a long time. Whatever possible adverse long term effects have to be (plausibility they actually happen) x (harm they cause) > known harms of being overweight. The scale of the solution is allowed to match t…

Well, don't say you weren't warned when it turns out the miracle is not such a miracle after all and it all massively backfires in a few decades, at which point you're still going to have to actually fix the real underlying causes.

The class of drugs having a 2+ decade negative health effect greater than the negative health effect of obesity over the same period, without any obvious short-to-medium health effect, is likely to be small.

Re: GLP-1s are breaking life insurance

#300

Post by DrillShopper »

phil21 wrote: post #219
DrillShopper wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi there - Mounjaro user here. I've been using it for about a year at this point. I feel sick for three days in a row after taking it. Even after several months on the same dose. I get horrible gut cramps, sour stomach, near constant nausea, and occasionally vomiting and diarrhea. I have to take my shot on Thursday night because I'll feel bad the next day and supremely sick the next two days. If I took it earlier or…

These are pretty extreme side effects for being on the drug thus long. What dosing are you on? If you’re still doing 2.5mg (smallest available in the auto injectors) perhaps try a compounding pharmacy for a month or two and you can experiment with lower doses and a different dosing schedule? During my peak weight loss period I found that matching my injection schedule to the 5 day half life of Tirzepatide and adjusti…

I wouldn't trust a compounding pharmacy with making this given some of the truly horrible horror stories I've heard, and I'm on it primarily for type 2 diabetes. This is the minimal dose that keeps my A1c and blood sugar where my internal medicine doctor wants them. The weight loss is a welcome side effect. That said, I have lost about 120 lbs in the last two years, so something I was doing before I got on Mounjaro was working. Mounjaro just helped make it consistent.

tbqh being extremely overweight sucks in a whole lot of ways. While the side effects sound miserable, they will only be temporary. The damage done to my body and metabolism as a result of being this heavy for this long piles up every day, so if I have to suffer like this then I'd rather do that than have a stroke and die in front of my family.

Post reply on HN