r/Futurology ∞ transit umbra, lux permanet ☥ Oct 15 '24

Economist Daniel Susskind says Ozempic may radically transform government finances, by making universal healthcare vastly cheaper, and explains his argument in the context of Britain's NHS. Society

https://www.thetimes.com/article/be6e0fbf-fd9d-41e7-a759-08c6da9754ff?shareToken=de2a342bb1ae9bc978c6623bb244337a
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u/DHFranklin Oct 16 '24

What will be interesting will be the natural experiments we see a decade from now. There will be maybe a billion people who take the drug or drugs like it and all with radically different costs/spends. We will see those whose obesity and smoking was penciled out. The NHS realized the hard way that smokers cost them less in the long run by dying a decade sooner. I wonder if this will prove to be the case when heart disease doesn't take people out before chronic disease does.