Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., says the first question he is going to ask Novo Nordisk’s CEO at a Senate committee hearing in September is why the drugmaker charges up to 10 or 15 times more for Ozempic and Wegovy in the U.S., compared to others countries.
“This is absurd,” Sanders said in an interview late Tuesday. “It is clear that Novo Nordisk is ripping off the American people.”
Novo Nordisk CEO Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen has agreed to testify in September over the pricing of the drugmaker’s hugely popular weight loss drugs, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions announced Friday.
It came three days after Sanders, who chairs the committee, threatened to hold a vote to subpoena Novo Nordisk President Doug Langa to provide testimony.
In a separate statement, a spokesperson for Novo Nordisk said that Jørgensen agreed after he and Sanders had “a productive call and agreed to find a mutually acceptable date for a hearing.”
Sanders said Tuesday that he is still working with Novo Nordisk to set an exact date for the hearing, but he expects it will be during the second week of September. He said his strategy for getting Novo Nordisk to reduce the cost of the drugs is simple: Put the company in the spotlight.
“I think enough public pressure may result in them lowering their prices substantially, which is obviously what my goal is,” the senator said. “This is a huge issue because it is likely that Ozempic and Wegovy may end up being the most lucrative product that the pharmaceutical industry has ever developed.”
In April, the committee launched an investigation into Novo Nordisk’s pricing practices. It cited a report that found that Novo Nordisk charges around $1,300 a month for Wegovy in the U.S., even though the drug can be purchased for $186 a month in Denmark, $137 in Germany and $92 in the United Kingdom. Some patients in the U.S. have said that the higher prices of Ozempic and Wegovy have pushed them to unregulated, copycat drugs for weight loss.
In reality, there’s little Congress can do about the high cost of the weight loss drugs in the U.S. Novo Nordisk charging higher prices is partly a function of how the American patent system works.
Drugmakers who develop new medications get to exclusively sell them on the U.S. market for a set period of time — typically 20 years. During this time, other companies can’t make generic versions of the drug, severely limiting competition. And unlike other countries, there is generally no direct pricing regulation on the drug by the federal government.
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