IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/34678.html

Do GLP-1 Medications Pay for Themselves?

Author

Listed:
  • Coady Wing
  • Sih-Ting Cai
  • Daniel W. Sacks
  • Kosali I. Simon

Abstract

GLP-1 receptor agonists improve treatment for diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular disease, but their high prices create fiscal pressure for insurers. GLP-1 spending may overstate net costs because health improvements reduce downstream health spending. We use insurance claims to estimate cost offsets for GLP-1s and find no reduction in downstream medical spending through 60 months. Rather, each dollar of GLP-1 spending generates $0.22 (SE 0.066) in additional non-GLP-1 medical spending, largely outpatient care. Offsets are similar across baseline health sub-populations. However, cost offsets for semaglutide—a more effective later generation GLP-1—are smaller and statistically indistinguishable from zero.

Suggested Citation

  • Coady Wing & Sih-Ting Cai & Daniel W. Sacks & Kosali I. Simon, 2026. "Do GLP-1 Medications Pay for Themselves?," NBER Working Papers 34678, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:34678
    Note: AG EH
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w34678.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or

    for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Meltem N. Daysal & Camille Fredrickson & Ida Lykke Kristiansen & Mircea Trandafir & Jonathan Zhang & N. Meltem Daysal, 2026. "The Labor Market Impacts of GLP-1s," CESifo Working Paper Series 12810, CESifo.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • I11 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Analysis of Health Care Markets

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:34678. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.