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GLP-1s are breaking life insurance

glp1digest.com

361–370 of 640 posts

Re: GLP-1s are breaking life insurance

#361
post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These medications don't work in the way many people think. The drug doesn't make you "lose weight" in the sense that it causes the body to excrete fat. Rather it interferes with the constants in the gut/brain signaling/programming system such that your brain doesn't want to eat as much. That in turn leads typically to weight loss.

I dont think there is any confusion about that. How would "excreting fat" even work?

DNP makes you burn fat, so technically it’s possible. It’s also dangerous as hell.

Re: GLP-1s are breaking life insurance

#362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> admittedly, it kind of sucks in the moment to be on I don’t think that’s a typical experience for most people, other than the price

There's often side effects, including nausea, diarrhea, headaches, bloating, discomfort, etc. As far as I can tell from forums, it's not like 5% have the side effects, it's like 80-90%. But for the first time in decades, I felt full. I didn't want to finish a meal, it was too much. My body regulated my food intake in what felt like a natural way. I hadn't even realized my body had somehow lost that fundamental mechan…

I’m sorry, but as one of the rare (decently) fit & nondiabetic people that have taken these drugs I’m going to call out your comment a bit.

While I have no doubt that obese people have gradually made appetite control harder for themselves, the full feeling you get on GLP meds is in no way the way us normal-weight people feel.

I too, could easy eat a whole bag of doritos after some pizza and then decide I want ice cream. I don’t do that because I know it’s an awful idea and so I maybe just have a pickle after the pizza instead.

On GLP-1 medications at a decent dose I don’t know if I could force myself to eat anything after half of my normal serving of pizza.

That’s not the way the rest of us normally are apart from rare exceptions, I assure you.

Re: GLP-1s are breaking life insurance

#363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean roughly in reference to the underlying mechanism it directly addresses, not all the downstream effects. And even that was, admittedly, sloppy, because there's some complex feedback loops involved. I guess it would be more accurate to say it is a maintenance medicine and not a complete cure, and so stopping taking it unmasks the continuing condition that is treating.

> stopping taking it unmasks the continuing condition that is treating Some of the prediabetics I knew who stopped taking it (N = 2) stopped being prediabetic (N = 1).

I mean, yeah. You could always just lose weight and probably get out of being prediabetic.

Re: GLP-1s are breaking life insurance

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> stopping taking it unmasks the continuing condition that is treating Some of the prediabetics I knew who stopped taking it (N = 2) stopped being prediabetic (N = 1).

I mean, yeah. You could always just lose weight and probably get out of being prediabetic.

> just lose weight

This might be the left-wing analog of climate denialism.

Re: GLP-1s are breaking life insurance

#365
post #4

Obesity is highly correlated with other medical conditions, from cancer to diabetes to heart disease. I wonder if there is a point at which it is cheaper for health insurance companies to offer subsidized or even free GLP-1s to patients than pay out for other specialized medications. For example, my insurance covers flu shots in my community every year because it's presumably less expensive to pay for the shots compa…

For the first insurer for the first year, sure. But just within few years their premium will drop if population start getting less sick.

Re: GLP-1s are breaking life insurance

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t say unnoticeable, but rather a trade-off that’s fine. My stomach is definitely more sensitive, can’t handle coffee in the morning anymore, etc. It probably depends on the person.

Huh. I’m at a healthy weight but I’m taking retatrutide for IBS and it’s working wonders. Very low dose, though. I originally tried it with semaglutide before the weight loss craze kicked off and the first few days of the week were worse and the latter half of the week was better, so that didn’t make sense for me to stay on.

With all of these long acting GLP's you will get a much smoother experience dosing them 2-3 times/week.

Re: GLP-1s are breaking life insurance

#367
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... and the question was about the aggregate effect. What happens if all life insurers go bankrupt?

That is great, they are by definition a net negative on the economy as a whole? You shouldn't gamble on your own health.

No. Many people have family/kids and want to care for them, and their plan A is to work until retirement. If they die prior to that, the family/kids would be in dire straits. That's plan B, the issue life insurance solves perfectly well.

That, in fact, is the general (and beneficial) function of insurance: You only need to provision for the expected loss (plus some fee for the insurance), not the maximum loss (which many people could not afford).

Re: GLP-1s are breaking life insurance

#368
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but if “healthy habits” were enough then people who’d lost weight the traditional way would keep it off. That's because a lot of the "traditional way" methods are pseudoscience at best, outright quackery that's going to send you into serious malnutrition issues or eating disorders at worst. Every two or three months you see a new diet fad pushed through the yellow press rags, and none of it anywhere near being cons…

I would have thought the "traditional way" would simply be eat less, move more (by changing your habits of course).

The problem is, most people aim way too high in their weight-loss target and sending their bodies into starvation mode, which will lead the body to reacquire the lost body fat as soon as possible - aka when people are happy with their body weight and scale up their food intake to caloric neutral again.

Re: GLP-1s are breaking life insurance

#369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38629387/ > Conclusion: Semaglutide displays potential for weight loss primarily through fat mass reduction. However, concerns arise from notable reductions in lean mass, especially in trials with a larger number of patients. That's a significant long-term damage to health, quite possibly permanent for 40+ patients.

Sounds scary doesn't it? It's a shame that the magnitude of lean-muscle loss is entirely comparable to that of going on a strict diet or fasting: Intermittent/time-restricted fasting https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar... ? That's simply how the body reacts to a caloric deficit, without additional exercise. If you combine both IFT and resistance exercise, you find no muscle loss at all: https…

> That's an apple to oranges comparison, because there's nothing preventing someone from taking Ozempic from exercising on the side.

Strongly disagree on this. If there was nothing preventing the patient from changing their diet and physical activity / exercise level they could lose the fat through diet and exercise without resorting to taking semaglutides in the first place. Withdrawal studies show that there is a clear tendency for the weight to rebound after withdrawal from semaglutide use, therefore it's very hard to argue that it is the weight / fat mass alone blocking patients from indulging in a healthier lifestyle.

Semaglutide may help manage sustained weight loss by e.g. reducing the effect of reduced leptin baseline, however overall I remain highly skeptical of possibility for semaglutides to be "a first-choice approach to robust weight loss".

Re: GLP-1s are breaking life insurance

#370

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…

I think this is pretty far off the cusp and seems like a bit of reddit logic "health insurance is scam, internet said so".

Health insurance is one of the rare services where incentives between consumer and business are well aligned. The vast majority of people are healthy. Healthcare is expensive in the US because the uninsured population continues to rise out of "they're not making me pay for it": There are entire tranches (in the US) also don't buy insurance and use the ER and abuse EMTALA for their primary care (most of this is actually unintentional in my opinion, it's less educated populations in the US who are repeatedly taken advantage of and left to ride on government, which is extremely eye-wateringly bad at spending money). Personal experience here working in an ER.

The real pathway in the US to success is getting those populations onto private health insurance. Obama tried a heavy handed "health insurance mandate" that hilariously somehow passed the supreme court, but was so laughable mis-aligned with American ideals even Biden wouldn't enforce it.

What is apparent though is these populations are completely willing to pay bills like their cell service, gasoline, car payments, etc before investing in the most important thing (their health). This gives me hope there is a way forward by riding these perceived essential services somehow. I'm not really sure what the answer is here, but there is at least opportunity for some creative solutions.

I also think the disagreement here between red vs blue isn't the outcome: both want people to be healthy. Red doesn't want single payer, whereas blue does. Red ignores the fact these systems don't exist, blue ignores the fact that no other country in the world has the diversity of America and there are not functional examples.

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