This is entirely unsurprising. Hopefully they can wrangle something functional out of the insurance at some point.

In my family medicine rotation a couple months ago, we got it approved for someone with pre-diabetes, high blood pressure, and stage 2/3 kidney disease (which is not very advanced. A lot of people over the age of 35-40 can technically fall into stage 1/2.)

If they have cardiovascular disease or kidney disease, those are getting added as indications for the GLP-1’s so they might be able to resubmit the authorization/claim with those diagnosis codes added to get it covered.

Unfortunately, the swing to the right and the rise of shit like “Blue Lives Matter” has changed this in some places. When I was in the western part of Virginia for school, there was a local car dealership called “Pinkerton” and I saw their dealership license plate frames and emblem on a LOT of cars in the area. Many of those cars also had the Gadsden vanity plates and a bunch of blue lives matter, trump, etc. stickers on them.

In fairness to their argument, I have actually seen serious consequences from the mass theft of baby formula. When I worked in a children’s hospital, we had babies coming in with malnutrition problems because they required a special formula that was completely unavailable. The parents couldn’t buy the formula because it was out of stock at every store they were able to get to with the transportation and time available to them.

People stealing massive amounts of formula cause massive problems because the specialty formulas are hard to find to begin with, and these people are clearing out store shelves to sell it overseas.

The wealthy parents that live in nicer neighborhoods with fancier stores and fewer problems with shoplifting don’t run into this issue. It the poor families in food deserts that are most impacted by this kind of mass theft, and they’re the families least able to work around it by just going to another store to buy it.