Medicare negotiated lower prices for 15 drugs, including 71% off Ozempic and Wegovy : Shots

The federal government has announced the results of the latest round of Medicare drug price negotiations: 15 lower drug prices for Medicare to take effect in 2027.

Medicare will get a 71% discount on Ozempic, Vegovy and Rebellus, the blockbuster drugs for obesity and type 2 diabetes whose current list prices are nearly a thousand dollars a month.

The talks also included medicines for asthma, breast cancer and leukemia. Remissions ranged from 38% for Austedo, which treats Huntington’s disease, to 85% for Janumet for type 2 diabetes.

“President Trump directs us to stop at nothing to reduce health care costs for the American people,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said in a press release. “As we work to make America healthy again, we will use every tool at our disposal to provide affordable health care to seniors.”

The program covering prescription drugs for more than 50 million seniors negotiated its first batch of drug price hikes last year, following passage of the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act in 2022.

A provision of that legislation, passed without Republican support, ended Medicare’s 20-year ban on negotiating drug prices.

Negotiations for this second batch of 15 medicines will be completed at the end of October.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) says that if the lower negotiated prices were to take effect in 2024, the new, lower Medicare prices would save the program $12 billion.

The latest negotiated prices are great news for taxpayers and patients, says Dr. Benjamin Rome, a health policy researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Federal taxpayers fund most of Medicare, but beneficiaries also must pay copayments and coinsurance.

“It’s a greater savings than the first round, but a lot of it has to do with the nature of the drugs being negotiated this year and perhaps some learning from experience,” he says.

Earlier this year, the drugs were selected based on criteria spelled out in the law. They must have no generic or biosimilar competition, have a large amount of Medicare spending, and must be on the market for many years.

The lower prices for Ozempic and Vegovy follow a separate deal announced by the Trump administration on Nov. 6 with Novo Nordisk, which makes both drugs.

The deal was part of the President’s pressure to get drug companies to voluntarily lower their US prices compared to other developed countries.

But, confusingly, the waivers from the Medicare negotiations were less significant than what Novo Nordisk agreed to give to Medicare as part of the Nov. 6 deal.

That previous deal set the price for Ozempic and Wegovi at $245 a month. But according to prices based on negotiations announced this week, prices for Ozempic, Vegovy and Rybelsus — the company’s type 2 diabetes pill — would be $274 a month.

“It is not clear why Novo (Nordisk) would promise different prices at two different locations,” Rome says.

In a company statement, Novo Nordisk explained that it “expects additional clarity from CMS on how pricing and coverage will work.”

The statement said the separate Trump administration deal “reflects a broader effort to expand access to obesity care in Medicare and Medicaid.”

(The deal expands access to the drugs in those two programs to people with a body mass index over 35 and a BMI above 27 who has additional health conditions. But details of how it will work are unclear.)

Novo Nordisk’s statement confirmed that the company is committed to advocating for affordable access to its medicines, but “we have serious concerns about the impact of the Inflation Reduction Act on patients and are opposed to government price gouging.”

AARP, an advocacy group for the 125 million Americans age 50 and older, was pleased with the results of the talks.

“Today’s announcement is another important step in our long-standing efforts to lower prescription drug prices,” AARP CEO Dr. Mychia Minter-Jordan said in a statement.

“Older Americans across the political spectrum consistently say lower drug prices are a top priority, and these negotiated prices will provide meaningful relief to millions of people on Medicare.”