More rules being considered to keep children safe online (bbc.co.uk)

Obesity is highly correlated with other medical conditions, from cancer to diabetes to heart disease. I wonder if there is a point at which it is cheaper for health insurance companies to offer subsidized or even free GLP-1s to patients than pay out for other specialized medications. For example, my insurance covers flu shots in my community every year because it's presumably less expensive to pay for the shots compared to the increased rate of hospitalization that the flu causes.

aqme28 · 7m ago

You’re thinking too highly about the incentives of the US healthcare system. Since insurance is tied to your employer (and therefore changing every few years), and most people die on Medicare, there’s not much incentive for insurance companies to pay for preventative care that won’t actually help you for several decades.

idontwantthis · 2m ago

You presume incorrectly. The flu vaccine has been covered for free because the federal government required it. RFK Jr. fired the entire CDC panel that created the requirement and replaced them with antivaxers. There’s a good chance it won’t be covered soon.

vslira · 14m ago

I've always felt that there's some trade to be done here, with life and health insurers basically giving glp-1 et all for free bc they lower the cost of everything else

edit: and then Big Annuity lobbying to oppose this

lesam · 2m ago

Aren’t “Big Life Insurance” and “Big Annuity” pretty much the same companies?

meltyness · 13m ago

Well I guess a GLP-1 pacemaker would address this. A lifetime of doses weighs at much as a nickel?

toomuchtodo · 22m ago

It sounds like aligning incentives here is requiring the weight stay off for the policy to remain in effect with an annual physical for monitoring, similar to what employers require for health insurance premium reductions. Point in time underwriting is suboptimal considering current state of the art of GLP-1s (unless newer protocols that can update metabolic profiles are delivered soon).

prasadjoglekar · 16m ago

Or life insurers paying for ongoing GLP-1s instead of potentially the health insurer.

But to your broader point, at least in the US, incentive mis-alignment on all healthcare and health insurance is possibly irredeemably broken.

artursapek · 2m ago

I still can’t believe millions of people are choosing to eat unhealthy food and medicate themselves out of obesity instead of just changing their diet.

llm_nerd · 15m ago

This is a fun read, however-

"Life insurers can predict when you'll die with about 98% accuracy."

This conclusion isn't supported by the linked document. The document instead is talking about expected vs actual deaths among demographic groups as a whole, not individual people. And that expected vs actual is just history + trends. This doesn't mean that insurance can say that Joe Blow is going to die in June of 2027 with "98% accuracy", obviously.

PaulDavisThe1st · 6m ago

Put a little differently, they can predict that of your cohort (defined somehow), after June 2027, only X percent of you will still be alive.

Will you be one of them? Click here to find out!

jgalt212 · 22m ago

I guess, but this is sort of the same as going on a statin to get your cholesterol down for a better insurance rate. Then going off because of reasons...

foota · 6m ago

I realize this is a fraught question, because not everyone is overweight by choice (whether due to a subsisting on whatever they can afford, time, genetics, injury, etc,.) but I believe that insurers are able to consider whether someone smokes cigarettes when setting premiums for ACA based healthcare. With the above caveats that would make this difficult, it would be nice if we could treat "voluntary" obesity similarly.