On May 13, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) published an open letter to Novo Nordisk on the front page of a leading Danish newspaper, urging the hometown company to live up to its altruistic standards by lowering U.
S. prices for its blockbuster diabetes and weight loss drugs . What Sanders didn’t realize was that Denmark, a country of 6 million, was enduring its own crisis over how to pay for the Novo Nordisk drugs Ozempic and Wegovy .
Most other developed countries, including Denmark, negotiate down drug costs for their citizens, paying prices that are a fraction of those in the United States. But when a drug is effective and expensive, pharmaceutical companies can play hardball on pricing. And Novo Nordisk did, at least initially, pushing the Danish health system to its limits.
The country’s socialized health system had for years covered Ozempic as a diabetes treatment, but in 2022 doctors began prescribing it for weight loss , too, and soon they “emptied all the money boxes in the entire public health system,” said University of Copenhagen professor Jens Juul Holst, a co-inventor of the drug. Countries around the world are struggling with how and when to pay for Ozempic, Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro, and other drugs in the same chemical class, particularly when they are prescribed for weight loss. Indeed, the sky-high prices paid in the U.
S. set a bar that pharmaceutical companies can use as they negotiate with other health systems. In Denmark, with prescriptions for the drug.