Blame drug ‘middlemen’ for Ozempic and Wegovy prices, Novo Nordisk CEO tells Congress

Novo Nordisk (NVO) CEO Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen will shift the blame for the high prices of the company’s popular weight loss treatments to drug middlemen and the ‘complex’ U.S. health care system today during a committee hearing in Congress.

Jørgensen is set to be grilled Tuesday morning by the the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee (HELP), chaired by Sen. Bernie Sanders, over what the company charges for its blockbuster drugs Ozempic and Wegovy in the U.S compared to other countries.

“You have said that our amazing medicines can’t help patients if they can’t afford them. That is true,” Jørgensen plans to say during prepared opening remarks shared with Quartz.

He adds, “it is clear that patients too often struggle to navigate the complex U.S. healthcare system. It is also clear that no single company can solve such vast and complicated policy changes.”

In the chief executive’s written testimony, he goes on to specifically point the finger toward pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), third-party administrators of prescription drug plans for health insurers.

Jørgensen wrote that the net price — the amount that Novo Nordisk is actually paid after manufacturer rebates and discounts are applied — of Ozepmic has dropped about 40 percent in the U.S., since it launched in 2017. Wegovy, which launched in 2021, has also seen its net price fall simlarily.

However, “while PBMs negotiate low net prices for their corporate parents, those insurers design their plans such that nearly half of all patients’ out-of-pocket spending for brand medication is based on the full list price, with the insurer collecting the difference,” Jørgensen wrote.

He warned that lowering the drugs’ list prices could have unintended consequences like health insurers dropping them from their formularies.

The U.S. list price for Ozempic is $968.52 a month and $1,349.02 for Wegovy.

In April, the HELP committee launched an investigation into the high prices the company charges for its blockbuster diabetes and weight loss drugs. The committee’s investigation found that the net cost of Ozempic in the U.S. is about $600 a month, well above the drug’s price in other countries. In Germany, for example, Ozempic costs just $59 for a month’s supply. Wegovy’s U.S. net price is $809, while it costs just $92 in the United Kingdom.

Jørgensen agreed to testify in front of the committee in June, after Sen. Sanders called for a vote to subpoena the pharma executive.

Last week, Sen. Sanders said that CEOs at major generic pharma companies have told him that they are willing to sell a generic version of Ozempic for less than $100.

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