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GLP-1s are breaking life insurance

glp1digest.com

621–630 of 640 posts

Re: GLP-1s are breaking life insurance

#621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been on GLP-1 for a month and my triglycerides halved, and my cholesterol dropped to the levels it was in my twenties. If that's not a predictor of lower mortality, there's something wrong with our fundamental medical knowledge.

I agree! (is this responding to part of my comment? :) )

Oh hmm, I may have replied to the wrong comment!

Re: GLP-1s are breaking life insurance

#622
post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having ADHD myself, and a bunch of friends who also have it, I have noticed that the people with this condition rarely have a healthy relationship with food. There is either a tendency to overeat indulgent foods, or a tendency to not think about food that much. I have also heard about people with ADHD being on GLP1 agonists that it does a lot for their reward seeking behavior and impulse control. This makes me wonder…

As I wrote to another person here: Yes. Not as much as with ADHD medication, but there is an obvious subset of addictive personalities that find relief from addictive behaviors (beyond eating addiction) with semaglutide. But to add to this, I feel like there are different kinds of addictive behaviors at play that are more susceptible to one medication or the other and are based on different systems. For instance, the…

> Semaglutide reduces addictive behavior if it's driven by emotional regulation needs

Emotional regulation issues are one of the most difficult ADHD traits and it's quite under recognized for how badly it affects many of us. This is likely the reason why anxiety misdiagnoses are also fairly common.

Re: GLP-1s are breaking life insurance

#623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scroll down to the area referencing footnote 9 in this article https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11457043/ That articulates it better than I will

Like I said above, they don't extend exclusivity or prevent practice of expired IP. All you have to do is not infringe the new IP. this is what the article says too. I disagree with their greater claim; The patents aren't rocket science- most are extremely easy to read, and the authors are hiding behind weasel worlds like "may" and "could" There are some bad patents that should never have been granted, like Novartis'…

What I’ve noticed, is work on extended release formulations only occur close to or near the time of patent expirations.

It’s rarely because of a new technological breakthrough, but rather a way of drug companies lengthening the time they can profit off a drug.

If they released it earlier they would simply take market share from themselves, but by releasing it close to the time of generics they take market share from generics.

Why didn’t Wegovy come out 5 years sooner? Why does it use a different injector than Ozempic? I don’t know but sounds quite similar to the ER/XR strategy.

Re: GLP-1s are breaking life insurance

#624
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…

"We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" The obesity trend has happened almost in lockstep with the proliferation of highly processed foods. Butter and animal fats being replaced with low quality, hydrogenated vegetable oils. Cane sugar being replaced with high fructose corn syrup and other highly processed sweeteners. Sodas and sugary juices replacing water. Food like substances with little to no nutritional…

Funnily enough, GLP1 might fix this food production issue as well. Since urges for junk food and stuff are lowered as well, it would be interesting to map how GLP1 spreads through the population vs junk food consumption.

Matt Levine in his column actually addressed that GLP1 could cause the junk food/alcohol/other addictive stuff industries to lose a lot of money due to less consumption.

It's possible that junk food becomes a niche thing given enough time and GLP1.

Re: GLP-1s are breaking life insurance

#625
post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" The obesity trend has happened almost in lockstep with the proliferation of highly processed foods. Butter and animal fats being replaced with low quality, hydrogenated vegetable oils. Cane sugar being replaced with high fructose corn syrup and other highly processed sweeteners. Sodas and sugary juices replacing water. Food like substances with little to no nutritional…

I agree with every word of your analysis and I agree that we've tried basically nothing. But this is why I talked about political capital—every one of your suggestions has been available for the last twenty years and nothing has come of it and the problem continues to get worse. When you say something like, "healthy food should be more affordable and readily available" you'll get a lot of nods of agreement but when i…

Of the measures you suggested, the one I've seen has worked was taxing soda and a direct correlation on less consumption.

The thing with healthy food is not that they are expensive, because they aren't, raw veggies, whole grains, raw chicken, raw pork are not that expensive, especially if you buy in bulk. The problem is that it takes time to cook them, which people may not have, and in general (at least the USA), I feel like people suck at cooking, and don't really have a good food culture of enjoying cooking, like italians do for example.

I believe something similar happened to cigarettes, they are super taxed as well as all the health campaigning around them.

Re: GLP-1s are breaking life insurance

#626
post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a social contract between the people and the enlightened. The people always win on a long enough timeline. But the deal is there should be some sliver of reward for a brief window of time to those who bring permanent light into our lives.

The "enlightened" are the scientists who actually developed this stuff, not the CEOs and corporate shareholders collecting economic rent from other people's hard work who pocket the vast majority of the profits. If we only had to fairly pay the people who actually did the useful work and not all the capitalist deadweight, these drugs would be orders of magnitude cheaper.

And you think scientists should be working for the communists instead of the capitalists? Well that's fine too. Scientists are like spoils of war. Scientists were treated well and able to do a lot of good work when they were all employed by the soviet state. Maybe not as good as the Americans did. They also seem to be doing well over in China. But just because you don't like someone or how they do business, that doesn't make them deadweight, and no I don't think you know how to get products to consumers cheaper.

Re: GLP-1s are breaking life insurance

#627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For mortality tables age and sex are pretty much sufficient to get to 98% accuracy.

You definitely (at least in the US) need income (or an income proxy like zip code). Mississippi has a life expectancy ~10 years less than Massachusettes.

This typically has surprisingly little impact on force of mortality.

Men under 40 essentially have incredibly low mortality. Once you exclude cars and suicide it drops basically to zero.

Even things that are very very bad for you, like being very obese (BMI>40), are factors that scale a mortality that is massively dominated by age and sex. Even 3x mortality at 25 rounds to zero. At 60 background become 1% per year and a 3x increase would make a huge difference.

I would wager $50 that there are no contiguous collection of zip codes in the USA where the average 40 year old has a higher life expectancy than the average 30 year old in any other contiguous set of zip codes assuming there are over 1000 people of that age in both.

Re: GLP-1s are breaking life insurance

#628
post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "enlightened" are the scientists who actually developed this stuff, not the CEOs and corporate shareholders collecting economic rent from other people's hard work who pocket the vast majority of the profits. If we only had to fairly pay the people who actually did the useful work and not all the capitalist deadweight, these drugs would be orders of magnitude cheaper.

And you think scientists should be working for the communists instead of the capitalists? Well that's fine too. Scientists are like spoils of war. Scientists were treated well and able to do a lot of good work when they were all employed by the soviet state. Maybe not as good as the Americans did. They also seem to be doing well over in China. But just because you don't like someone or how they do business, that does…

Let's not assume self‑interested corporate monopoly rents are a necessary precondition for innovation, and let's drop the romanticized notion that statutory patent terms by themselves constitute a just moral bargain, because history shows substantial discovery emerging from publicly funded science, mission driven nonprofits, collaborative consortia, open licensing, prizes, and advance market commitments, so we should test which incentive mixes work rather than presuppose one. Your "people always win on a long enough timeline" line doesn't answer the moral question of avoidable deaths, irreversible morbidity, or financial ruin before expiry; inevitability ≠ adequacy, and harms incurred during exclusivity remain morally chargeable. Commercialization does not require locking invention behind maximal (often crude, lengthy) IP, there are workable paths via milestone or frontloaded prizes, targeted or indication specific exclusivities, compulsory or voluntary licensing, patent buyouts, tiered pricing, and public manufacturing backstops; optimal mixes will and should differ across high‑income vs low and middle income country purchasing power. The "7‑year wait" is factually thin: statutory patent term is ~20 years from filing, while effective market exclusivity depends on regulatory data protections, biologic exclusivities, secondary or evergreening patents, litigation delays, and manufacturing barriers; patients routinely face restricted access even after nominal expiry. We also shouldn't conflate discovery scientists with development firms, nor firms with shareholders; in practice, salaried scientific labor is often alienated from downstream pricing power while financialization channels can parasitically extract surplus that need not translate into new R&D. Because many medicines and virtually all software have low marginal production cost relative to monopoly price, large deadweight losses arise when willing buyers are priced out, a staggering public welfare loss (and no, "deadweight" is not necessarily a synonym for "people you dislike"). Reading int_19h's rent‑extraction critique as a demand for Soviet central planning, and pivoting to talk of scientists as "spoils of war", is a straw man and a red herring that dodges the pricing structure at issue. If you want to defend the patent regime as a "social contract," we need to see the reciprocal side, access safeguards, anti‑evergreening enforcement, affordability commitments, otherwise it's a moral bargain in name only. Claiming membership among the "enlightened" means actually shedding light on these failures.

Re: GLP-1s are breaking life insurance

#629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can you explain this statement to me more? I think i'm missing something

The health insurance companies are paid as a percentage of the amount of care that flows through them. So healthier customers means their profit is 5% of SMALLER_NUMBER.

> So healthier customers means their profit is 5% of SMALLER_NUMBER.

I don't think this is completely true right? Rather, it's more accurate to say that customers that are seen as healthier get to pay less premiums, but customers that are seen as unhealthy have to pay more.

In both scenarios, you, as the insurance company, still want to be minimizing the amount of care you actually pay for.

In other words, to maximize profits, it seems like the best customer is one that's high risk (high premiums), but less likely to require a catastrophic payout. In which case, it feels like an obese high risk patient on ozempic seems like a pretty solid deal.

Re: GLP-1s are breaking life insurance

#630
post #628
post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you think scientists should be working for the communists instead of the capitalists? Well that's fine too. Scientists are like spoils of war. Scientists were treated well and able to do a lot of good work when they were all employed by the soviet state. Maybe not as good as the Americans did. They also seem to be doing well over in China. But just because you don't like someone or how they do business, that does…

Let's not assume self‑interested corporate monopoly rents are a necessary precondition for innovation, and let's drop the romanticized notion that statutory patent terms by themselves constitute a just moral bargain, because history shows substantial discovery emerging from publicly funded science, mission driven nonprofits, collaborative consortia, open licensing, prizes, and advance market commitments, so we should…

Go vomit words at someone else. I didn't even read it lol
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