New Alzheimer's Drug's Coverage Highlights The Negative Bias Dominating The Coverage Of Our New Antiobesity Medications
On Thursday the FDA approved Leqembi, a new drug for people with Alzheimer’s, which has been shown to maybe, in some cases, slow (not stop, not reverses) cognitive decline for 5-18 months, and in other cases, either do nothing, or rarely, cause serious and life threatening brain swelling and bleeding that have at times led to death. Leqembi’s annual cost? $26,500. But that’s just for the drug. When you factor in the costs of its intravenous delivery and the repeated brain scans required to watch for brain swelling and bleeding the estimated annual cost will be somewhere near $90,000. Coverage over the past few days makes it clear that medicare and insurers will begin covering it almost immediately.
Contrasts the hoopla and dollars being thrown at Leqembi which provides benefits that one expert for the New York Times reported as subtle, where he points out,
“You’re not going to experience the perception of changes in your cognition or function in the same amount of time.”
which echoes the study findings,
“The treatment benefit of 0.45 points on the 18-point CDR-SB score is well below the minimal clinically important difference (MCID) in AD clinical trials.”
with that of Ozempic which confers a dramatic, medically meaningful, durable weight loss that reduces the risk of or puts into remission many weight responsive chronic diseases (like diabetes and high blood pressure) while simultaneously improving quality of life which costs half as much as Leqembi’s drug cost and roughly 1/7th the cost when you include its administration and brain scans, and where coverage has been near uniformly negative and where an op-ed was published in the New England Journal Of Medicine stating Medicare should not cover it and where most insurers don’t.
Because last week the link didn’t work, here again is the link to my recent piece in TIME debunking 10 of the most common arguments trotted out to try to discredit antiobesity medications.
Have a great weekend!