> It states that “at their current prices, [anti-obesity medicines] would cost the federal government more than it would save from reducing other health care spending—which would lead to an overall increase in the deficit over the next 10 years”

… and that reason is because obese people have lower lifetime medical cost. Anything that reduces obesity will tend to increase long-term healthcare spending, because it’s cheaper to die of congestive heart failure at 50 than to live to 80 and incur a couple hip replacements and a bunch of expensive end-of-life care.

(technically it varies by country, depending on their particular allocation of end-of-life spending vs earlier care, but generally the expected cost of a 1-unit BMI reduction is more likely to be neutral or positive than an overall total reduction. And the US is even worse since we weight spending enormously heavily towards senior care due to Medicare - someone dying at 40 is a very cheap outcome for our system.)

> A one-unit decrease in BMI showed gains in life expectancy ranging from 0.65 to 0.68 year and changes in total health care costs varying from -€1563 to +€4832.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37222003/

Skinny people have been absolute bastards about the whole thing from the start, they don’t want to lose the ability to look down on and belittle a class of sub-humans, they want to smirk and tell people to eat less and work out more, and losing that underclass will hurt their own perceived social standing. So now that there’s a drug that helps people eat less, it needs to be argued against strenuously lest that eventuality come to pass.

That’s why you’re seeing the moralizing and “they should lose weight without medical assistance!!!” come out instantly yet again. It was never about actually wanting them to lose weight per se, it was about the ability to moralize to an underclass who that group argues deserves their status - the whole “my assholery is an incentive to lose some weight!” school of thought that is so prominent.

Semaglutide and the class of drug is overall extremely well-studied, well-tolerated, and effective at treating several different families of chronic medical problems around the reward system of the brain. And that’s frankly terrifying to a large group of people who are low-key bigots and are facing the loss of their favorite punching bag. Like what if there was a drug that you just took it and 90% of people lost significant amounts of weight? That’s terrifying to a group of people who without a subclass to look down on will now move down a rung on the social ladder themselves.

The black mirror with the exercise bikes nailed it. People want to toss soda cans at fatties forced to work menial subclass jobs and tell them to lose some fucking weight, that’s what it’s always been about in this discourse from the start. They just can’t quite get away with physical assault in our reality, but they’ll certainly endorse emotional abuse and unequal treatment, “for their own good” etc.

It’s just a shame that this sentiment has also hindered the ability to look into endocrine disruption or gut microbiome etc. There are lots of interesting things that skinnies were too emotionally vulnerable to allow research into, that have just been vaulted over by semaglutide.