After weeks of anticipation and an appointment scheduled so far out it felt like I was booking a Beyoncé tour date, I finally got in to see my weight management doctor at Kaiser. The topic? The same one that’s been haunting my credit card like a ghost with bad intentions: Why the hell did my Ozempic coverage disappear overnight?
Spoiler alert: no one really knows. Or maybe they do and just aren’t saying—because keeping us fat, sick, and dependent is big business. There’s no profit in wellness, but there’s a goldmine in keeping us circling the drain. Funny how that works, huh?
What I do know is this—Ozempic, the one medication that’s actually been working for me, now comes with a new price tag: $712 a month. Yes, SEVEN HUNDRED AND TWELVE. For a month. For one pen. One. Uno. Singular.
This couldn’t have hit at a worse time. I was finally seeing progress, finally feeling like I had a handle on things—and I hadn’t even reached my goal weight yet. To have the rug pulled out now? It’s cruel timing, like the universe handing you a map and then snatching it back halfway through the journey.
Me: “Per year?”
Doctor: “Per month.”
Me: [internal screaming]
So now I’m spending my evenings not meal prepping like a good little patient, but deep in Reddit threads and expat blogs trying to figure out how to get Ozempic from Canada or the UK without ending up on some federal watchlist. Because here in the land of the free and the home of the uninsured, if you want to stay alive, you better be ready to pay luxury car prices for your medication.
Meanwhile, my doctor—who honestly tried her best and didn’t give me the usual “just eat less and move more” condescension—told me if I wanted to go off Ozempic, she’d recommend a little cocktail of phentermine, topiramate, and metformin.
Y’all.
That’s not a cocktail. That’s a chemical ménage à trois with side effects that read like a horror novel: anxiety, insomnia, dizziness, nausea, numb fingers, mood swings, suicidal thoughts. Oh, and maybe some weight loss if you can survive the rest.
“
Because here in the land of the free and the home of the uninsured, if you want to stay alive, you better be ready to pay luxury car prices for your medication.
So, to recap: The one drug that’s working for me is now financially out of reach, the alternatives are a Frankenstein mix of off-label pills, and I’m spending my spare time learning how to import meds like I’m running a black-market pharmacy out of my living room.
This is what American healthcare looks like: a system that punishes you for not being thin, then punishes you again for trying to do something about it.
I didn’t ask for this journey, but here I am—injecting dignity one overpriced pen at a time.
Stay tuned. There will be more. Especially if I figure out how to get this stuff across the border without getting arrested.
