Weekly Video: GLP-1s
An unnoticed medical experiment
This week’s video was inspired by this blog post from Scott Alexander:
I read the post and thought, how come I didn’t know about all this?
I mean I had some vague sense that everyone was on Ozempic, but the scale shocked me. Further, it was generic Ozempic for relatively cheap. This whole thing was happening and I had no idea and as Scott Alexander says, it seemed to go great.
I think a good rule is – let people buy stuff they want. There are some goods where you would want some restrictions probably, like things that might harm the person or people around them (gambling, drugs, bluetooth speakers in public– the Econ term for these things would be goods with negative externalities), but IN GENERAL, just letting people buy things they want doesn’t seem like a terrible starting point. Especially when that thing is good for them. As is almost certainly the case with Ozempic.
Since I wrote, and recorded the video, some things have changed– mainly it seems Novo Nordisk has struck a deal with the online pharmacies to sell direct-to-consumer. The price has gone up relative to the generics (it seems like it is somewhere between $300-$500) but less than the $1000 it was pre-generics. So expanded supply has brought the price down some.