[djd20]

I call bs... the utterly terrible customer experience is what lost them their customers. And constant changing of plans which became less and less effective... all of their 10$ a month customers don't suddenly have the budget to spend 1000$ a month on ozempic.

[kotaKat]

That’s why there’s all sorts of sketchy compounding pharmacies stepping up to the plate, not to mention the “research peptide” market…

[doctorpangloss]

> ... the past two years have been a fun experiment in semi-free-market medicine. I don’t mean the patent violations - it’s no surprise that you can sell drugs cheap if you violate the patent - I mean everything else. For the past three years, ~2 million people have taken complex peptides provided direct-to-consumer by a less-regulated supply chain, with barely a fig leaf of medical oversight, and it went great. There were no more side effects than any other medication. People who wanted to lose weight lost weight. And patients had a more convenient time than if they’d had to wait for the official supply chain to meet demand, get a real doctor, spend thousands of dollars on doctors’ visits, apply for insurance coverage, and go to a pharmacy every few weeks to pick up their next prescription.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43369502

[financetechbro]

This comment feels disingenuous. Peptides were first synthesized in the 80s and we have been providing peptide drugs to diabetes patients since the 2000s. So this “experiment in semi-free-market medicine” in which “there have been no more side effects than any other medication” is built on the back of 20yrs of research + 20yrs of commercial use.

To me it seems like quoted comment is trying to make a case for the deregulation in healthcare. Which is 1) a slippery slope and 2) not supported by the example they provided. It’s just a whole lot of libertarian vaporware

[sumtechguy]

It has been interesting how that company managed to stay around.