Costco is now providing its US customers with prescriptions for Ozempic medicines through its low-cost health care partner, Sesame.
The program, which is renewable for three months, formally debuted on Tuesday. According to the firm, a weight loss doctor or expert will provide customers with a video consultation, a GLP-1 or prescription for weight reduction, if necessary, and continued support through unrestricted messaging and assistance with a health care practitioner.
Sesame claims to be able to administer oral weight-loss drugs in addition to injectable semaglutides like Ozempic and Wegovy. It also offers to help patients lose five percent of their body weight in three months, ten percent in six, and fifteen percent in a year.
The $179 three-month plan does not cover the cost of medicine, and Sesame cautioned on its website that GLP-1s may cost anywhere from $950 to $1,600 a month without insurance.
Last October, Costco started providing its members online health checks for as little as $29. At the time, the retailer had just joined with Sesame, a direct-to-consumer health care marketplace that links customers and medical providers around the country.
However, two months following that announcement, according to Sesame co-founder and president Michael Botta, Costco and Sesame noted that about one in five consumer questions concerned weight-loss assistance. To meet that demand, the companies started developing a new program.
“It wasn’t what we initially thought would make sense to offer for Costco members who were coming to Sesame,” he told CNN. “But we realized pretty quickly, just by looking at what people were curious about, that there was a clear unmet need here,” he added.
In the last three months of 2022 alone, US healthcare practitioners wrote more than nine million prescriptions for Wegovy and other injectable medications used for weight reduction. By 2030, 30 million people, or around 9% of the US population, may be on GLP-1 medications, according to JPMorgan researchers’ estimates.
