Insurance denials for popular new weight loss medications leave patients with risky choices

Some patients have been successful on powerful new drugs for weight loss, but then they lose access to them because insurance won’t cover them.

When she started taking the weight loss medication Wegovy in November 2021, Macarena Khoury had a BMI of 37, and she spent most of her day thinking about food. “All the time. All day. Like, ‘I’m hungry. I need to eat this. Why did I eat this?’ or ‘OK, I’m not going to eat this, it has too many calories,’ ” said Khoury, who runs her own interior design business. Khoury, 37, moved to the US from Chile when she married her husband in 2015. The change in food, and especially the larger portions, led her to gain 30 pounds. Then she had four pregnancies, gaining more weight each time. Her thoughts became dominated by mental chatter about food, she said, something Wegovy users shorthand on social media as “food noise.” “Wegovy took away all those thoughts,” she said. “I was completely free.” She says she didn’t make big changes to what she ate, just ate a lot less. She also continued to do regular Peloton bike rides.