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by ceejayoz
169 days ago
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> But a world where literally millions of people are on a “lifetime drug” to reduce their bodyweight seems to be exactly what the big pharmaceutical companies are hoping for. They will make tens of billions of dollars every year if this is the case. They (and other elements of our healthcare industry) already make a lot more than that on treating the side effects of widespread obesity. |
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This raises a thought I hadn't considered before: given how much money gets made off of obese people, it wouldn't be surprising if there would be significant commercial interests that would want to try to actively hamper anything that'd systematically reduce the overall population percentage of obesity. We've seen plenty of examples in the past (and ongoing) of perverse incentives. In turn, I wonder if it's actually a small silver lining that the drugs are so wildly profitable for the short term, in that the producers are incentivized to lobby against any efforts to legally hobble them. And then in the longer term it will all go off patent.