CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz clarified that a deal has not yet been sealed with the manufacturer of semaglutide, Novo Nordisk, or any other GLP-1 drugmaker.
President Donald Trump promised from the White House Thursday that Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic will cost about $150 when he and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz are done negotiating with the company. The assertion sent the Danish pharma’s shares sliding 3% as the markets opened Friday morning.
Rival Eli Lilly also declined over 2.5%. BMO Capital Markets brushed off the president’s threats as “aggressive posturing,” noting that there have to date been no actual negotiations conducted for GLP-1 drugs, as Oz later clarified.
In his remarks during a press conference announcing a negotiation with EMD Serono to discount certain fertility drugs for in vitro fertilization, Trump repeated a familiar story about learning that a popular weight loss drug costs about $130 in London but $1,300 over in New York.
Later, when asked by a reporter, Trump confirmed that he was talking about the “fat loss drug,” naming it as Ozempic. Semaglutide is marketed as Ozempic for diabetes and Wegovy for weight loss; however, Ozempic has also been prescribed off label for weight loss.
Trump promised that his administration would bring Ozempic’s U.S. cost down to about $150 out of pocket through Most Favored Nation drug pricing negotiations.
Oz then stepped to the microphone to clarify that those negotiations had not yet happened. “We have not negotiated those yet. We’re going to be rolling these out over time. The GLP-1 category of drugs, which includes Ozempic, have not been negotiated yet,” Oz said.
Neither Trump nor Oz provided a timeline or confirmed that negotiations specifically with Novo are happening.
“I think those are going to come down pretty fast,” Trump said, referring to the price of Novo’s products. Again, Oz stepped up: “The president will be happy with those results, and until he is, we’re not going to close those negotiations.”
‘Any Way the Wind Blows’
The White House was the setting in the past few weeks for two of Novo and Lilly’s peers, Pfizer and AstraZeneca, to announce MFN agreements with the Trump administration. Both companies’ CEOs appeared with Trump and his health cabinet to announce that some of their drugs would be listed on an as-yet-created site called TrumpRx at steep discounts.
BMO and other analysts largely shrugged at the announcements—although they said the deals did help eliminate some of the policy unknowns surrounding tariffs and drug pricing that have been dogging the entire pharmaceutical industry for months. BMO said that after Trump’s latest remarks, their views remain unchanged.
“Coming away from today’s statements by the Trump administration our view remains unchanged that impacts to the sector from MFN should remain largely muted with real implementation challenging,” the analysts wrote in a note to investors Thursday.
With that said, Seigerman expects GLP-1s in particular to continue to face pricing pressure.
“We know GLP1 pricing is and will continue to be under pressure, but today’s comments reinforce the ‘any way the wind blows’ nature of U.S. Health Policy,” Seigerman wrote.
The current list price for Wegovy in the U.S. is $1,349.02 for a 28-day supply, according to Novo. But the manufacturer offers rebates that can bring down the cost to about $499 a month, as long as patients pay out of pocket without using insurance. While not all commercial insurance covers the weight loss medication, Novo says that through payers that do, patients may pay just $224 per month, or nothing at all.
GoodRx also offered a direct-to-consumer coupon setting the price at $499 per month.
The BMO analysts called the MFN negotiations more of a “headline risk” to GLP-1 makers than a real threat. Nevertheless, the drugmakers were pressured at the stock market after the announcement and into Friday morning.
