I think it's totally fair to be skeptical, but it's also not rare to have interventions that are astoundingly effective.

Antibiotics and vaccines may not be completely free lunches, but they're very good at what they do.

The transformer paper was published in 2017, and within 8 years (less so, if i'm being honest), we have bots that passed the Turing test. To people with shorter term memories, passing the turing test was a big deal.

My point is that even if things are pleatuing, a lot of these advancements are done in step change fashion. All it takes is one or two good insights to make massive leaps, and just because things are plateauing now, it's a bad predictor for how things will be in the future.

> So healthier customers means their profit is 5% of SMALLER_NUMBER.

I don't think this is completely true right? Rather, it's more accurate to say that customers that are seen as healthier get to pay less premiums, but customers that are seen as unhealthy have to pay more.

In both scenarios, you, as the insurance company, still want to be minimizing the amount of care you actually pay for.

In other words, to maximize profits, it seems like the best customer is one that's high risk (high premiums), but less likely to require a catastrophic payout. In which case, it feels like an obese high risk patient on ozempic seems like a pretty solid deal.

can you explain this statement to me more? I think i'm missing something

hmm...doesn't this possibly incentivize ozempic subsidies even more?

If you know a "customer" of yours (an individual employee) is only going to be with you until they either change jobs or go on Medicare, then it seems the name of the game then is to make sure that nothing catastrophic happens to them until you can hand them off to someone else.

In which case, they should definitely go on ozempic. Even if the effects of ozempic immediately come off after usage, it's a short-term enough solution that benefits the insurance company, no?