GLP-1 drugs hit real estate

So many ripples: Snack food companies were looking at sales losses because of GLP-1 drugs. Medicare/-caid worried about how they were going to afford them. Orthopedic surgeons were looking at fewer patients.

Now those drugs are getting so popular they’re affecting the kinds of buildings healthcare companies are considering building or buying. Health facilities are rethinking bariatric surgery and even cardiology and orthopedic centers and in favor of consumer-friendly “facilities focused more on lifestyle and metabolic health.”

Congrats to UGA’s new coat-wearers!

UGA just onboarded 146 new Doctor of Pharmacy students at its White Coat Ceremony. Here they are, looking all fresh-faced and innocent, not knowing yet what awaits:

Fun fact: The female to male ratio of the class of 2028 is 3:1.

Hacking Mounjaro

People paying out of pocket for Mounjaro found that — because a high-dose pen costs the same as a low-dose pen — breaking one open and splitting the dose can save a lot of money. Sure there are risks, but if you can split a high-dose pen into six doses, as some patients do, you’ve cut the price by [does math] 83%.

As one splitter put it:

“For me, that’s really just a harm-reduction principle. There are so many people this drug could be so life-changing for, but it’s just utterly, ruinously expensive.”

Have you checked your magnesium?

If you have low levels of magnesium, you’re at risk for DNA damage that can make you “more susceptible to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, gastrointestinal diseases, a range of cancers, and diabetes.”

That’s according to Aussie molecular biologists who found that when magnesium levels were low, patients had higher levels of homocysteine, an amino acid that happens to damage DNA.

“Our study showed a direct correlation between low magnesium levels in blood (less than 18mg/L) and increased DNA damage, even after adjusting for gender and age.”

Next step: Figure out the optimum levels and dietary intake.

Luckily there’s a vaccine

Getting shingles just once can raise someone’s risk of “long-term confusion and memory loss” — and thus a career as a politician — by 20 percent.

That comes out of a 17-year meta-study of almost 150,000 participants (25 to 75 years old) by researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital. They aren’t sure why this is happening, but they speculate it could be because of “neuroinflammation, direct neuron injury, or the activation of other herpesviruses.”

How Medicare saved billions

You’ve obviously heard the news that the Medicare price negotiations will be saving taxpayers something like $6 billion a year (and seniors “should save $1.5 billion in out-of-pocket costs when the price changes take effect in 2026”).

If you’re curious about the nitty-gritty details of the drugs, the prices, and the process, CMS has a 4-page PDF that explains it all.

6 billion forward, 5 billion back

One of the ways the Inflation Reduction Act helps seniors is by capping how much they have to spend on prescription drugs. But that means insurance companies have to spend more, and they aren’t going to take that sitting down. So they’re raising Medicare premiums.

In response, to stick to the original goal (keeping seniors’ costs down), CMS is planning to give those insurers $15 per month for each patient to keep those premiums down, which will cost the government $5 billion the first year.

That said, the numbers from the price negotiations are still in taxpayers’ favor:

The nonpartisan congressional scorekeeper Congressional Budget Office estimated that the drug pricing negotiation provisions in the IRA will reduce Medicare spending by $98.5 billion over 10 years.