The chief executive of the drugmaker Novo Nordisk, Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen, is scheduled to face tough questions Tuesday on Capitol Hill about the high costs of the company’s widely popular weight-loss drugs.
Jørgensen will appear before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions during a livestreamed hearing Tuesday starting at 10 a.m. ET.
The head of the committee, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has been vocal about his frustrations over how much Novo Nordisk charges Americans for both Ozempic (used to treat type 2 diabetes) and Wegovy (approved for weight loss).
“In general, we pay by far the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. Same exact medicine sold in Canada, Europe is a fraction of what it is in the United States,” Sanders said in an interview Monday. “The result of that is that hundreds of thousands of people in this country who desperately need this product will not be able to afford it.”
A previously released committee report showed that the cost of Wegovy is significantly less in European countries — from $140 a month in Germany to $92 a month in the United Kingdom. Americans pay about $1,349 a month for the exact same drug.
“It is clear that Novo Nordisk is ripping off the American people,” Sanders told NBC News in June.
In a statement Monday, Novo Nordisk defended its pricing structure.
“We appreciate that it is frustrating that each country has its own healthcare system, but making isolated and limited comparisons ignores” a “fundamental fact,” the company said. “Unfortunately, even when we lower our prices, too often patients in the United States don’t receive the savings — this is a problem.”
A Department of Health and Human Services report in February found that in 2022, prices of all drugs in the U.S. — both brand name and generic — were nearly three time as high as in other wealthy countries.
The company also stated that Ozempic’s net price has gone down by 40% since it was introduced in the U.S. Wegovy, too, is “following a similar trajectory.” The net price is how much money a drug company makes from a drug after rebates and discounts.
In an interview with NBC News last month, Jørgensen defended the costs of both drugs by saying that it was actually saving taxpayer money by reducing health care costs associated with obesity and type 2 diabetes.
“If you look at just the cost of obesity in the U.S., it’s a disease that costs Americans more than $400 billion a year,” he said. “We are actually providing products that’s actually helping take that cost burden off.”
Sanders has also said that other pharmaceutical companies have claimed that they could make generic versions of Ozempic and Wegovy, which contain the same active ingredient, semaglutide, at a fraction of the cost. He has declined to name the companies.
Novo Nordisk holds the patent on semaglutide, so other companies aren’t able to make a generic version. That leaves Novo Nordisk — and ultimately Jørgensen — to answer questions about the price of its blockbuster drugs.
Berkeley Lovelace Jr. and Jane Weaver contributed.
