August 7, 2024 • 14 mins
What happens when new weight-loss drugs like Ozempic transform a community? Bloomberg healthcare reporter Madison Muller went to Bowling Green, Kentucky to find out. That area has one of the highest concentrations of weight-loss drug prescriptions in the US.
On today’s Big Take podcast, we explore what that means for people who live there, how these drugs are reshaping the local economy, and what it could look like in other places when Ozempic comes to town.
Read more: What Happens When Ozempic Takes Over Your Town
Listen more: Are Cheaper Ozempic Knockoffs Safe?
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
When you think about ozempic and other similar drugs, it's
likely one group of people comes to mind. TikTok is
all over it, and so are some celebrities.
Speaker 3 (00:18):
Speculations surrounding celebrities who've slimmed down dramatically. Not everyone who
needs them can get them, and some who don't need
them for medical use may be the problem.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Eli Lilly, the company behind two similar drugs, zep Bound
and Manjarro, even aired an ad during the Oscars criticizing
celebrities for contributing to shortages.
Speaker 4 (00:38):
For the smaller dress attucks for vanity. But that's not
the point.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
So you might think that places like Hollywood or New
York City would have the highest concentration of people on
these drugs, places packed with the rich and famous, influencers,
people with money to spend on their appearance. That's exactly
what Marie Ellis thought.
Speaker 4 (00:58):
When I first got on to how can seeing all this?
I was like, what is this? Is this for real
or is this just for people in Hollywood.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
She's an accountant in Kentucky, and she says she struggled
with weight loss her whole life until she tried Mount Jarrow.
Speaker 4 (01:14):
So I've been on about a year and a half
and I've lost eighty one pounds.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
And Marie isn't the only one.
Speaker 4 (01:19):
My sister in law was doing the same thing. I
mean she was dropping six to ten pounds every time.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Schwade in.
Speaker 4 (01:26):
You can eat whatever you want to. I mean, my
husband has not changed anything and lost forty pounds.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
Marie and her husband and her sister in law are
just a few of the people in her community who
have taken these drugs. It turns out the epicenter of
the weight loss shot boom wasn't a wealthy, image obsessed
enclave like Hollywood or Manhattan's Upper East Side, but right
in Marie's own backyard. Today, on the show Welcome to Ozempictown, USA,
(01:56):
we take a look at Bowling Green, Kentucky, the area
with one of the highest constin trations of prescriptions for
weight loss drugs in the United States, and unpack what
it can tell us about how these drugs could transform
communities across the country. This is the big take from
Bloomberg News. I'm David Gurak. A decade ago, Bowling Green
(02:20):
had farms on the outskirts of town, today, it's a
city of seventy four thousand people, the third largest in Kentucky.
It's the birthplace of Duncan Hines, the namesake of those
fudgy brownie mixes. One of the city's biggest employers is
the GM factory that churns out corvettes, and according to
the city's official website, it has more restaurants per capita
(02:42):
than anywhere else in the country.
Speaker 3 (02:44):
Driving down the main road into Bowling Green, there's like
a McDonald's, a taco bell, and then another McDonald's, and
it's just like fast food place after fast food place.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
Madison Muller is a healthcare reporter at Bloomberg with a
focus on weight loss drugs. She visited Bowling Green twice
to report this story.
Speaker 3 (03:02):
In like the month between the trips that I took
to Bowling Green, there were more advertisements for the weight
loss shots. There's like fast food places and then assigned
for a weight loss shot on the other side of
the road.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Madison's been reporting on these drugs, known as glp ones,
for over a year now, and she says Bowling Green
is not the place she would have expected to find
when she started crunching the numbers to identify the location
of Ozepic Town, USA. How did you go about pinpointing
where the capital actually is?
Speaker 3 (03:33):
So we got data from an analytics firm called Purple Lab,
and so we looked at different zip codes across the
US to try to figure out which ones had a
really high concentration of weight loss drug users. And there
were a few different hot spots, like there was one
in Huntsville, Alabama, and a couple of other places. Bowling
Green was one of the highest. We could also see
(03:55):
that Kentucky as a state has the highest concentration of
weight loss drug users, so we figured that that was
a good place to look.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
And what they found was that around four percent of
residents in the Bowling Green area had a prescription for
a weight loss drug. That's quadruple the rate in the
Miami area or Brooklyn, New York. And it's a conservative
estimate since some people get off brand versions of the drugs.
So what is it about this city that makes it
so right for people to use these drugs?
Speaker 3 (04:22):
Yeah, so the obesity rates there are pretty high, and
people there also have the means in many cases to
afford these drugs, which are quite expensive. They're like one
thousand dollars a month. A lot of big employers there
were also covering the drugs, so those conditions sort of
made it like the perfect place for these drugs to
really take off. And for most people, these drugs work
(04:44):
pretty quickly, relatively speaking, and so they tell their cousin,
they tell their friends, they tell their whoever, and then
it just sort of spreads like wildfire.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
Madison and her colleagues wanted to know what it's like
to live at the very center of America's weight loss
drug craze, but the idea that they were at the
heart of it all took some people by surprise.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
Like I remember we went to a place called Posh Salon,
and it was funny seeing the women in the salon
sort of laugh about ozembic because they're like, what are
you talking about? Bowling Greens the capital of you know,
ozempic in the US. But then they were all like, actually, yeah,
the more that we think about this, everyone we know
is on these drugs, including Nikki Wilson, the owner of
(05:32):
the salon, who lost like twenty pounds and then stopped
taking it. But her clients noticed her weight loss asked
her what she was doing I don't.
Speaker 5 (05:42):
Care to talk about like everybody would us.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
We know.
Speaker 5 (05:45):
Also I was yeah, the shots, I wasn't like I'm
working out and I'm doing it diet.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
She told them she was on one of the weight
loss shots and says that a lot of her clients
ended up going on the shots as well as a result.
Speaker 5 (05:57):
Yeah, I have a lot of clients that they would too,
so one of my guns. She came in yesterday she
saw us fourteen parents.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Madison also visited a local doctor in Bowling Green, doctor Suman.
Shekar she's been practicing family medicine there for the past
decade and when she.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
Moved to Bowling Green, she was very struck by the
number of people with obesity and the number of patients
that she was seeing across the board, kids to elderly people,
and then the consequences of obesity, so like heart disease
and other issues developing in pretty young people.
Speaker 6 (06:32):
It is much easier to educate a forty year old
than like a.
Speaker 4 (06:36):
Ten to fifteen year old.
Speaker 6 (06:38):
We have seeing a lot of hypotensive and obese patients
in that age.
Speaker 3 (06:42):
Group, and for a long time she didn't really have
that many tools that were effective to help that. Besides
diet and exercise, in some of the older weight laws,
drugs that weren't as effective, and so she thinks it's
a good thing that a lot of patients now are
coming in and actually ask her about ozembic because they're
hearing about it on TV or on social media. And
(07:04):
she's glad that people want to do something about their help.
Speaker 6 (07:08):
Almost what we put some off auditions autobies. Once they're
coming go in and asking go zimbik, it's they're thinking
about all this. It's a good and positive thing that
the wrong to lose weight. They are inclined dus betterment.
Speaker 4 (07:25):
Of their help.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
Like Candy Gray, she's the executive director of a senior
living home in Bowling Green.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
She has a really sort of heartbreaking story because she
lost many family members to heart disease and strokes.
Speaker 7 (07:43):
Within four weeks time. I had lost two brothers to
massive heart attacks. Wow, and both of my parents had
died of strokes. So that was when, honestly, I took
a good long book in the mara and said, Okay,
I've got to do something different.
Speaker 3 (08:02):
That was sort of her turning point. That's why she
decided to go on ozembic.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
What was her experience like on the drug.
Speaker 3 (08:09):
Yeah, she lost a lot of weight and she had
a really good experience, no side effects.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
The compliments were rolling in.
Speaker 4 (08:15):
They say, honey, you really lost the weight. What'd you do?
Speaker 7 (08:18):
It's like, oh, I took him shots like everybuddy else.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
She was like, I have no shame in telling people
that I used these weight loss drugs, because you know,
she thinks that they should be destigmatized.
Speaker 7 (08:31):
Obesity is a disease. Treating obesity it's really no different.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
How much did it change her eating and drinking habits broadly,
and beyond that, maybe social habits as well.
Speaker 3 (08:45):
Candy is a very social person and was telling us
that Southern culture really revolves around eating.
Speaker 7 (08:53):
He think about it. How many of our social events
and I know you know this, they're all surrounded around thoo.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
And so that was something that was difficult to navigate
at first. But she didn't want to give up her
social life. She has kids, she has friends, you know,
her and her husband go out to Friday night dinners
with their friends. It's something that she wasn't willing to
give up. So she just figured out how to tailor
her experience to the weight loss drugs.
Speaker 7 (09:19):
Do we still do our every Friday night dinners with
our friends Absolutely if we can. Am I eating half
of what I used to eat before?
Speaker 2 (09:27):
Yes, But if eating half of what they used to
is good for their health for businesses in Bowling Green,
there could be some undesired side effects.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
One of the main things we were really interested in
figuring out in Bowling Green is are these drugs changing
the economy?
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Coming up the surprising ways that Ozepictown, USA's economy has
been transformed by these drugs.
Speaker 3 (09:59):
We keep hearing from analysts and from different companies that
these drugs are going to change everything. And the CEO
of Nova Noordis told us that he's getting calls from
scared food CEOs who are like asking him about the
drugs that his company's making.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
Given these dire warnings, Bloomberg Health reporter Madison Muller told
me she'd expect it to see restaurants going out of
business and empty gyms in Bowling Green, Kentucky.
Speaker 3 (10:24):
But the gym's doing fine. The restaurants were all bustling.
What you do see is this kind of side economy developing.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
A side economy. Take, for example, the local GNC a
place where you can buy vitamins and supplements.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
They have all of these supplements right at the front
of the store for people that have side effects from
the drugs, and the GNC's general manager told me that
all of those supplements are extremely popular.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
She has people coming in all the time asking about them.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
And then there are new businesses.
Speaker 3 (10:57):
There's a lot of medical spas that have been popping
up in the last couple of years to offer these
shots and to offer compounded versions.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
That are cheaper.
Speaker 3 (11:07):
So it's like this side economy is sort of developing
around ozempic, and if anything, it's actually like boosting some
of the businesses there.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
Candy Gray, who went on ozempic after losing several family
members to obestie related health problems. She turned to one
of those new alternatives, a telehealth company offering a copycat drug.
Speaker 7 (11:26):
The first six months I took brand it ozmpic, and
the end I no longer qualified for my insurance to
pay for it.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
She says that off brand version costs her about two
hundred and fifty dollars a month, and that's a pretty
common occurrence in Bowling.
Speaker 3 (11:43):
Green, says Madison, there's a lot of people that went
on these drugs, and even in the course of the
couple of months that we were going to Bowling Green
and talking to people there, their insurance has stopped covering it.
Med Center Health where doctor Shakhar works. That health center
was paying for the drugs for m employees but stopped
in January, and they're one of the largest employers in
(12:03):
Bowling Green. So this is something that's happening across the US,
but we're seeing it really acutely in Bowling Green, where
there is such a high concentration of people on these
drugs and the lack of availability and accessibility is making
people seek out alternatives from other places.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
The four percent of Bowling Green area residents with these
drug prescriptions, that doesn't account for all those knockoffs and
compounded versions that people get through medical spas or telehealth services.
As Madison told us in an episode last month, those
versions aren't as regulated as the brand name medications, but
they can often be a lot cheaper and easier to get.
Speaker 3 (12:47):
The problem with that is that there is variability in
how good the medications are, how safe they are.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
Some of them are fine, some of them are not.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
Madison, what's the takeaway as you see what would the
consequences be if more towns, more cities became like Bowling Green.
Speaker 3 (13:05):
The takeaway from this story is that it's not just
Bowling Green. Like we zoomed in on Bowling Green to
sort of show what's happening there, but just covering this
beat for the last you know, year plus. There's so
many themes that we were seeing and hearing in Bowling
Green that I have heard from patients all over the
(13:25):
US and likely are playing out in other cities across
the US.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
And Madison says those voices from Bowling Green offer a
window into what we may hear more of the good
and the bad from side effects. My wife's frustrated because
at night she wants to have dinner.
Speaker 6 (13:41):
To get now it's like that's says Sick.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
To access and affordability.
Speaker 4 (13:45):
I called every pharmacy in Balling Green. I could not
find it anywhere.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
Nowhere to the way these drugs can transform what's possible
for people like Candy Gray.
Speaker 7 (13:54):
For the first time last year, I went to Colorado
and was able to hike seven miles, got to seed
spots and do things that I never would have probably
been able to do before.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm David Gera.
This episode was produced by Julia Press. It was fact
checked by Jessica Beck and edited by Aaron Edwards and
Rebecca Greenfield. It was mixed by Blake Maples. Our senior
producers are Kim Gittleson and Naomi Shaven. Our senior editor
is Elizabeth Ponso. The Cold Beamster Boor is our executive producer.
Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks so much
(14:33):
for listening. Please follow and review The Big Take wherever
you get your podcasts. It helps new listeners find the show.
We'll be back tomorrow
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
When you think about ozempic and other similar drugs, it's
likely one group of people comes to mind. TikTok is
all over it, and so are some celebrities.
Speaker 3 (00:18):
Speculations surrounding celebrities who've slimmed down dramatically. Not everyone who
needs them can get them, and some who don't need
them for medical use may be the problem.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Eli Lilly, the company behind two similar drugs, zep Bound
and Manjarro, even aired an ad during the Oscars criticizing
celebrities for contributing to shortages.
Speaker 4 (00:38):
For the smaller dress attucks for vanity. But that's not
the point.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
So you might think that places like Hollywood or New
York City would have the highest concentration of people on
these drugs, places packed with the rich and famous, influencers,
people with money to spend on their appearance. That's exactly
what Marie Ellis thought.
Speaker 4 (00:58):
When I first got on to how can seeing all this?
I was like, what is this? Is this for real
or is this just for people in Hollywood.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
She's an accountant in Kentucky, and she says she struggled
with weight loss her whole life until she tried Mount Jarrow.
Speaker 4 (01:14):
So I've been on about a year and a half
and I've lost eighty one pounds.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
And Marie isn't the only one.
Speaker 4 (01:19):
My sister in law was doing the same thing. I
mean she was dropping six to ten pounds every time.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Schwade in.
Speaker 4 (01:26):
You can eat whatever you want to. I mean, my
husband has not changed anything and lost forty pounds.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
Marie and her husband and her sister in law are
just a few of the people in her community who
have taken these drugs. It turns out the epicenter of
the weight loss shot boom wasn't a wealthy, image obsessed
enclave like Hollywood or Manhattan's Upper East Side, but right
in Marie's own backyard. Today, on the show Welcome to Ozempictown, USA,
(01:56):
we take a look at Bowling Green, Kentucky, the area
with one of the highest constin trations of prescriptions for
weight loss drugs in the United States, and unpack what
it can tell us about how these drugs could transform
communities across the country. This is the big take from
Bloomberg News. I'm David Gurak. A decade ago, Bowling Green
(02:20):
had farms on the outskirts of town, today, it's a
city of seventy four thousand people, the third largest in Kentucky.
It's the birthplace of Duncan Hines, the namesake of those
fudgy brownie mixes. One of the city's biggest employers is
the GM factory that churns out corvettes, and according to
the city's official website, it has more restaurants per capita
(02:42):
than anywhere else in the country.
Speaker 3 (02:44):
Driving down the main road into Bowling Green, there's like
a McDonald's, a taco bell, and then another McDonald's, and
it's just like fast food place after fast food place.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
Madison Muller is a healthcare reporter at Bloomberg with a
focus on weight loss drugs. She visited Bowling Green twice
to report this story.
Speaker 3 (03:02):
In like the month between the trips that I took
to Bowling Green, there were more advertisements for the weight
loss shots. There's like fast food places and then assigned
for a weight loss shot on the other side of
the road.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Madison's been reporting on these drugs, known as glp ones,
for over a year now, and she says Bowling Green
is not the place she would have expected to find
when she started crunching the numbers to identify the location
of Ozepic Town, USA. How did you go about pinpointing
where the capital actually is?
Speaker 3 (03:33):
So we got data from an analytics firm called Purple Lab,
and so we looked at different zip codes across the
US to try to figure out which ones had a
really high concentration of weight loss drug users. And there
were a few different hot spots, like there was one
in Huntsville, Alabama, and a couple of other places. Bowling
Green was one of the highest. We could also see
(03:55):
that Kentucky as a state has the highest concentration of
weight loss drug users, so we figured that that was
a good place to look.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
And what they found was that around four percent of
residents in the Bowling Green area had a prescription for
a weight loss drug. That's quadruple the rate in the
Miami area or Brooklyn, New York. And it's a conservative
estimate since some people get off brand versions of the drugs.
So what is it about this city that makes it
so right for people to use these drugs?
Speaker 3 (04:22):
Yeah, so the obesity rates there are pretty high, and
people there also have the means in many cases to
afford these drugs, which are quite expensive. They're like one
thousand dollars a month. A lot of big employers there
were also covering the drugs, so those conditions sort of
made it like the perfect place for these drugs to
really take off. And for most people, these drugs work
(04:44):
pretty quickly, relatively speaking, and so they tell their cousin,
they tell their friends, they tell their whoever, and then
it just sort of spreads like wildfire.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
Madison and her colleagues wanted to know what it's like
to live at the very center of America's weight loss
drug craze, but the idea that they were at the
heart of it all took some people by surprise.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
Like I remember we went to a place called Posh Salon,
and it was funny seeing the women in the salon
sort of laugh about ozembic because they're like, what are
you talking about? Bowling Greens the capital of you know,
ozempic in the US. But then they were all like, actually, yeah,
the more that we think about this, everyone we know
is on these drugs, including Nikki Wilson, the owner of
(05:32):
the salon, who lost like twenty pounds and then stopped
taking it. But her clients noticed her weight loss asked
her what she was doing I don't.
Speaker 5 (05:42):
Care to talk about like everybody would us.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
We know.
Speaker 5 (05:45):
Also I was yeah, the shots, I wasn't like I'm
working out and I'm doing it diet.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
She told them she was on one of the weight
loss shots and says that a lot of her clients
ended up going on the shots as well as a result.
Speaker 5 (05:57):
Yeah, I have a lot of clients that they would too,
so one of my guns. She came in yesterday she
saw us fourteen parents.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Madison also visited a local doctor in Bowling Green, doctor Suman.
Shekar she's been practicing family medicine there for the past
decade and when she.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
Moved to Bowling Green, she was very struck by the
number of people with obesity and the number of patients
that she was seeing across the board, kids to elderly people,
and then the consequences of obesity, so like heart disease
and other issues developing in pretty young people.
Speaker 6 (06:32):
It is much easier to educate a forty year old
than like a.
Speaker 4 (06:36):
Ten to fifteen year old.
Speaker 6 (06:38):
We have seeing a lot of hypotensive and obese patients
in that age.
Speaker 3 (06:42):
Group, and for a long time she didn't really have
that many tools that were effective to help that. Besides
diet and exercise, in some of the older weight laws,
drugs that weren't as effective, and so she thinks it's
a good thing that a lot of patients now are
coming in and actually ask her about ozembic because they're
hearing about it on TV or on social media. And
(07:04):
she's glad that people want to do something about their help.
Speaker 6 (07:08):
Almost what we put some off auditions autobies. Once they're
coming go in and asking go zimbik, it's they're thinking
about all this. It's a good and positive thing that
the wrong to lose weight. They are inclined dus betterment.
Speaker 4 (07:25):
Of their help.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
Like Candy Gray, she's the executive director of a senior
living home in Bowling Green.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
She has a really sort of heartbreaking story because she
lost many family members to heart disease and strokes.
Speaker 7 (07:43):
Within four weeks time. I had lost two brothers to
massive heart attacks. Wow, and both of my parents had
died of strokes. So that was when, honestly, I took
a good long book in the mara and said, Okay,
I've got to do something different.
Speaker 3 (08:02):
That was sort of her turning point. That's why she
decided to go on ozembic.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
What was her experience like on the drug.
Speaker 3 (08:09):
Yeah, she lost a lot of weight and she had
a really good experience, no side effects.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
The compliments were rolling in.
Speaker 4 (08:15):
They say, honey, you really lost the weight. What'd you do?
Speaker 7 (08:18):
It's like, oh, I took him shots like everybuddy else.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
She was like, I have no shame in telling people
that I used these weight loss drugs, because you know,
she thinks that they should be destigmatized.
Speaker 7 (08:31):
Obesity is a disease. Treating obesity it's really no different.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
How much did it change her eating and drinking habits broadly,
and beyond that, maybe social habits as well.
Speaker 3 (08:45):
Candy is a very social person and was telling us
that Southern culture really revolves around eating.
Speaker 7 (08:53):
He think about it. How many of our social events
and I know you know this, they're all surrounded around thoo.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
And so that was something that was difficult to navigate
at first. But she didn't want to give up her
social life. She has kids, she has friends, you know,
her and her husband go out to Friday night dinners
with their friends. It's something that she wasn't willing to
give up. So she just figured out how to tailor
her experience to the weight loss drugs.
Speaker 7 (09:19):
Do we still do our every Friday night dinners with
our friends Absolutely if we can. Am I eating half
of what I used to eat before?
Speaker 2 (09:27):
Yes, But if eating half of what they used to
is good for their health for businesses in Bowling Green,
there could be some undesired side effects.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
One of the main things we were really interested in
figuring out in Bowling Green is are these drugs changing
the economy?
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Coming up the surprising ways that Ozepictown, USA's economy has
been transformed by these drugs.
Speaker 3 (09:59):
We keep hearing from analysts and from different companies that
these drugs are going to change everything. And the CEO
of Nova Noordis told us that he's getting calls from
scared food CEOs who are like asking him about the
drugs that his company's making.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
Given these dire warnings, Bloomberg Health reporter Madison Muller told
me she'd expect it to see restaurants going out of
business and empty gyms in Bowling Green, Kentucky.
Speaker 3 (10:24):
But the gym's doing fine. The restaurants were all bustling.
What you do see is this kind of side economy developing.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
A side economy. Take, for example, the local GNC a
place where you can buy vitamins and supplements.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
They have all of these supplements right at the front
of the store for people that have side effects from
the drugs, and the GNC's general manager told me that
all of those supplements are extremely popular.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
She has people coming in all the time asking about them.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
And then there are new businesses.
Speaker 3 (10:57):
There's a lot of medical spas that have been popping
up in the last couple of years to offer these
shots and to offer compounded versions.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
That are cheaper.
Speaker 3 (11:07):
So it's like this side economy is sort of developing
around ozempic, and if anything, it's actually like boosting some
of the businesses there.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
Candy Gray, who went on ozempic after losing several family
members to obestie related health problems. She turned to one
of those new alternatives, a telehealth company offering a copycat drug.
Speaker 7 (11:26):
The first six months I took brand it ozmpic, and
the end I no longer qualified for my insurance to
pay for it.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
She says that off brand version costs her about two
hundred and fifty dollars a month, and that's a pretty
common occurrence in Bowling.
Speaker 3 (11:43):
Green, says Madison, there's a lot of people that went
on these drugs, and even in the course of the
couple of months that we were going to Bowling Green
and talking to people there, their insurance has stopped covering it.
Med Center Health where doctor Shakhar works. That health center
was paying for the drugs for m employees but stopped
in January, and they're one of the largest employers in
(12:03):
Bowling Green. So this is something that's happening across the US,
but we're seeing it really acutely in Bowling Green, where
there is such a high concentration of people on these
drugs and the lack of availability and accessibility is making
people seek out alternatives from other places.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
The four percent of Bowling Green area residents with these
drug prescriptions, that doesn't account for all those knockoffs and
compounded versions that people get through medical spas or telehealth services.
As Madison told us in an episode last month, those
versions aren't as regulated as the brand name medications, but
they can often be a lot cheaper and easier to get.
Speaker 3 (12:47):
The problem with that is that there is variability in
how good the medications are, how safe they are.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
Some of them are fine, some of them are not.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
Madison, what's the takeaway as you see what would the
consequences be if more towns, more cities became like Bowling Green.
Speaker 3 (13:05):
The takeaway from this story is that it's not just
Bowling Green. Like we zoomed in on Bowling Green to
sort of show what's happening there, but just covering this
beat for the last you know, year plus. There's so
many themes that we were seeing and hearing in Bowling
Green that I have heard from patients all over the
(13:25):
US and likely are playing out in other cities across
the US.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
And Madison says those voices from Bowling Green offer a
window into what we may hear more of the good
and the bad from side effects. My wife's frustrated because
at night she wants to have dinner.
Speaker 6 (13:41):
To get now it's like that's says Sick.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
To access and affordability.
Speaker 4 (13:45):
I called every pharmacy in Balling Green. I could not
find it anywhere.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
Nowhere to the way these drugs can transform what's possible
for people like Candy Gray.
Speaker 7 (13:54):
For the first time last year, I went to Colorado
and was able to hike seven miles, got to seed
spots and do things that I never would have probably
been able to do before.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm David Gera.
This episode was produced by Julia Press. It was fact
checked by Jessica Beck and edited by Aaron Edwards and
Rebecca Greenfield. It was mixed by Blake Maples. Our senior
producers are Kim Gittleson and Naomi Shaven. Our senior editor
is Elizabeth Ponso. The Cold Beamster Boor is our executive producer.
Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks so much
(14:33):
for listening. Please follow and review The Big Take wherever
you get your podcasts. It helps new listeners find the show.
We'll be back tomorrow
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Sarah Holder
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