The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected that thanks to the negotiations, Medicare’s prices for semaglutide products “will fall substantially beginning in 2027.” That would also open the door to lower prices for competing obesity drugs like Eli Lilly’s Zepbound. Pharmacy benefit managers, which negotiate drug prices, would have more leverage to demand lower prices closer to what the government pays for semaglutide. If the government were to expand coverage of obesity drugs, the amount Medicare would spend on each patient taking one of them would fall by about a third in 2027, the CBO projected. That would slow the growth of the government’s spending on obesity drugs even as more people on Medicare started using them.
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