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    Some States Say They Can’t Afford Ozempic and Other Weight Loss Drugs

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    Public employees in West Virginia who took the drugs lost weight and were healthier, and some are despondent that the state is canceling a program to help pay for them.Joanna Bailey, a family physician and obesity specialist, doesn’t want to tell her patients that they can’t take Wegovy, but she has gotten used to it.Around a quarter of the people she sees in her small clinic in Wyoming County would benefit from the weight-loss medications known as GLP-1s, which also include Ozempic, Zepbound and Mounjaro, she says. The drugs have helped some of them lose 15 to 20 percent of their weight. But most people in the area she serves don’t have insurance that covers the cost, and virtually no one can afford sticker prices of $1,000 to $1,400 a month.“Even my richest patients can’t afford it,” Dr. Bailey said. She then mentioned something that many doctors in West Virginia — among the poorest states in the country, with the highest prevalence of obesity, at 41 percent — say: “We’ve separated between the haves and the have-nots.”Such disparities sharpened in March when West Virginia’s Public Employees Insurance Agency, which pays most of the cost of prescription drugs for more than 75,000 teachers, municipal workers and other public employees and their families, canceled a pilot program to cover weight-loss drugs.Some private insurers help pay for medications to treat obesity, but most Medicaid programs do so only to manage diabetes, and Medicare covers Wegovy and Zepbound only when they are prescribed for heart problems.Over the past year, states have been trying, amid rising demand, to determine how far to extend coverage for public employees. Connecticut is on track to spend more than $35 million this year through a limited weight-loss coverage initiative. In January, North Carolina announced that it would stop paying for weight-loss medications after forking out $100 million for them in 2023 — 10 percent of its spending on prescription drugs.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      McKinsey Is Under Criminal Investigation for Its Opioid Work

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      Federal prosecutors are examining the consulting company’s role in helping “turbocharge” the sale of painkillers like OxyContin.The Justice Department is investigating McKinsey & Company, the international consulting giant, for its role in helping drug companies maximize their sale of opioids.The investigation is led by the U.S. attorneys’ offices in Massachusetts and the Western District of Virginia in coordination with the department’s civil division in Washington, according to two officials familiar with the case who spoke on condition of anonymity.Since 2021, McKinsey has agreed to pay about $1 billion to settle investigations and lawsuits across the United States related to the firm’s work with opioid makers, principally Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin. McKinsey recommended that Purdue “turbocharge” its sales of the drug in the midst of the opioid crisis, which has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. McKinsey has not admitted any wrongdoing.News of the criminal investigation was first reported by The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.The investigation has been underway for several years. Endo, a pharmaceutical company that hired McKinsey to advise on the sale of the opioid Opana, said in a regulatory filing that it received a subpoena in December 2020 from the Western District of Virginia seeking information about McKinsey. The New York Times reported on the existence of that subpoena in 2022. Last year another opioid maker, Mallinckrodt, said it received a grand jury subpoena from the same U.S. attorney’s office but did not mention any connection to McKinsey.Federal prosecutors are also looking into whether McKinsey obstructed justice in its handling of records, according to The Journal.By 2018, senior McKinsey consultants were growing increasingly worried that they might be held to account for their opioid work. On July 4 of that year, Martin Elling, a leader in the firm’s pharmaceutical practice, made a decision he would later regret. He sent an email to Arnab Ghatak, a senior partner, asking whether they should eliminate documents and emails connected to opioids.Mr. Ghatak replied: “Thanks for the heads up. Will do.”Both men were fired after The Times reported in 2020 about the existence of the emails.It isn’t unusual for criminal investigations like this to go on for many years, especially ones involving two U.S. attorneys’ offices, the Justice Department and possibly state agencies as well, Rick Mountcastle, a former federal prosecutor, said.He led a criminal investigation into Purdue Pharma that resulted in the company’s guilty plea in 2007 to having misled regulators, doctors and patients about the dangers of OxyContin. “It is a huge monster bureaucracy that moves at a very slow pace,” said Mr. Mountcastle, who was not a source confirming the existence of the investigation.McKinsey made about $86 million over many years advising Purdue Pharma. The bulk of that work took place after Purdue’s guilty plea. In 2019, McKinsey said it would no longer advise clients on opioid-related business.Ramiro Prudencio, a spokesman for McKinsey, declined to comment. A spokesman for the Justice Department had no comment on the case. More

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      National Academy Asks Court to Strip Sackler Name From Endowment

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      Millions in Sackler donations sat dormant, rising in value as the opioid epidemic raged and as other institutions distanced themselves from the makers of a notorious painkiller.The National Academy of Sciences is asking a court to allow it to repurpose about $30 million in donations from the wealthy Sackler family, who controlled the company at the center of the opioid epidemic, and to remove the family name from the endowment funds.The petition filed by the Academy in Superior Court in Washington, D.C., Thursday aims to modify the terms of the donations so the institution can use them for scientific studies, projects and educational activities.The move follows a report in The New York Times last year that examined donations from several Sackler members, including an executive of Purdue Pharma, which produced the painkiller OxyContin that has long been blamed for fueling the opioid crisis that has claimed thousands of lives.“The notoriety of the Sackler name has made it impossible for the Academy to carry out the purposes for which it originally accepted the funds,” Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences, said in a statement released on Thursday.Daniel S. Connolly, a spokesman for the Raymond Sackler family, said it supported the National Academies in “using the funds as they see fit” and would have supported the change.“We would have said yes if we’d been asked, just as we will still say yes despite this unnecessary court filing and false assertions about us,” Mr. Connolly said in a statement.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More