So, the honeymoon is over, and the price is going up. Originally it was estimated it would go up something like 170% thankfully since then, it has settled down and the reality is much lower, but still a considerable rise. I have seen the price I will pay through Asda go from £198 to £298 a rise of 50%
It’s very frustrating when, for many people this was still quite hard to fit into their budget, but budget for it they have, and now suddenly we’ve got to find another chunk of money. A lot of people have talked about moving over to alternative treatments like Wegovy, where the price hasn’t changed. This is purely an Elli Lilly price change. My expectation is, even if sales go off a cliff in the UK because of the price rise, that that won’t exactly frighten Elli Lily because their worldwide sales, I suspect can cope with a fall in the demand in the UK.
I also read suggestions online from people saying that our government should step in and subsidise the cost of the drug. I have to say that I am totally inclined to agree with this. Every single person who is taking the drug privately but legitimately, and by legitimately I simply mean people who are answering all the questions completely accurately. And not just trying to take the drug just to lose that last few pounds to get into a bikini, anyone who meets the legitimate requirements to take this drug is saving the NHS thousands and thousands of pounds and I don’t think it’s wrong that the government should support us in that.
I confess that when I heard about the price rise, I did order myself and my mum an extra pen so that we had another five weeks on hand. Sorry if my panic buying made it harder for anybody else to access the drug at this time, but it’s not as if I stockpiled dozens of pens, I simply bought one pen, a bit earlier than I would’ve previously bought it, just so that I had one more before the prices changed in September.
This means that the first time I order something at the new price will be later this month. I have looked at the prices on Asda and they are doing a lot more options where you can buy two pens at once but even doing that only saves you £10
When I was training in NLP and hypnosis, and we were talking about how we would charge for our services, I shocked my peer group by saying that there was no price that I would not write on a cheque if you guaranteed for me to lose weight. And I pretty much stand by this. I’m loving being slimmer. I’m loving being fitter and I am not going to risk that for the sake of finding an extra 100 quid a month and if that means cutting down or something else, I’ll do it. But I totally accept that there are some people for who that extra £100 a month is a difference between being able to afford it and not afford it, and I do know that I’m very fortunate that I am in a position where I can find that extra bit.
There are also news stories around Elli Lilly’s new development of a one-day pill and the hope that that could be available next year. That is still my hope that by the time I’m ready to come off Mounjaro there will be a solution designed for maintenance that I can take potentially forever. As I’ve shared before, I have lost significant amounts of weight in the past at least twice before and have gained all of it back with interest very rapidly when I’ve gone back to my usual eating patterns, so I am not naive enough to think that that could not happen again.