Government Price Controls on Obesity Drugs
This policy brief discusses the implications of proposed US price controls on drugs for both public
and private payers based on the manufacturing costs of producing the medications or foreign
prices. We provide an in-depth discussion of the recent rationales offered for such price controls
on diabetes and anti-obesity medications. We find that such rationales are misguided and that if
such price controls were to be adopted, they would cause great harm to patients with obesity. We
find that the overall benefits of these drugs far exceed their costs and, therefore, government price
controls would greatly hurt US patients with obesity. We discuss that the large amount of
therapeutic price competition the current obesity drug pipeline indicates would be a more
productive force to control prices than through regulation.
*Partial financial support for this project was provided by Eli Lilly and Company.
The views expressed in this white paper are those of the authors.
To read the full paper, click here.