America, Your Fat

by Buck Sexton for Money and Power

This really resonate with me as I’m getting to that soon to retire age, which forces you to sign up for Medicare.

{The healthcare system in this country is broken.

If you ask Americans, “Which companies do you hate dealing with most?”, health insurance would win in a landslide. I don’t care who you are… Republican, Democrat, rich, middle class, living in a big city or out in the suburbs… you’ve got a story. And it’s never a good one.

You fill out forms online, then you show up and they hand you the same forms again like it’s the first time anyone’s ever seen your name. Or you get a bill weeks later that makes no sense, and you spend hours on the phone trying to get it cleared up.

Worst and perhaps most common of all, you’re denied coverage for something that is crucial to your health. And that’s not even a rare experience. Just business as usual.

What’s frustrating is that we spend more on healthcare than any country in the world. Not a little more. A lot more.

But what do we have to show for it?

We’ve got chronic disease everywhere, people getting sicker earlier, all while paying more and more every year.

Insurance companies aren’t in the business of making you healthier. They’re in the business of managing risk and protecting their margins.

So, instead of a system focused on keeping people healthy, what we’ve built is one that activates once you’re already sick. It manages the illness, bills for the illness and then keeps growing as more people get pulled into its orbit.

And all of us are stuck paying for it.}

{The Collapse Is in the Math

This is about to get a whole lot worse, by the way.

The problem is America’s older population is growing astronomically by the day, and the scope of healthcare you need skyrockets as you age. The healthcare system spends an enormous sum of money in the last years of life — more visits, more drugs, more procedures, more everything — and that’s where the real cost hits.

The only way this model holds together is if you have a large group of younger, healthier people who are paying for but not really using the system, effectively subsidizing the group that does need a lot of care.

But that balance is slipping in a huge way right now.

We’ve got more people moving into the high-cost years, fewer people on the front end to offset it and no real mechanism inside the system that brings costs down.

At the same time, many younger Americans are getting squeezed from every direction. Wages haven’t kept up, cost of living is high and for plenty of them, health insurance starts to feel like a luxury they can’t justify… so they just drop it.

They’re not paying for coverage “just in case” anymore. They’re rolling the dice and hoping nothing goes wrong, because the monthly cost is already too much to afford. That pulls even more healthy people out of the system, which only makes the imbalance worse for everyone.

So you’ve got rising demand but a shrinking base of people paying into the system. That’s a dangerous combination.

When people say this system is unsustainable, that’s what they mean. It’s not just frustrating to deal with. It’s built on assumptions that don’t hold anymore. And going forward, the numbers just don’t work.}

My sister thinks all change to the health care systems is to just get rid of the aging citizens. If you're aging and are on social security 10 to 1 you're living on a fixed income. My parents didn’t have any 401, or retirement fund. Social security would take care of you. Now Medicare keeps going up, it doesn’t cover everything, so you need a supplemental, which comes out of your pocket. (aka the money you are supposed to live off from). So, you can’t pay for your medical bills, so you chose not to go to the doctor, get sick and die.

{Fat America

This is the part that might be a little uncomfortable, but I’m just going to say it…

America is fat.

And look, I’m not saying that from some high horse. I’ve had to clean up my own habits, too. I went through a whole weight loss push last year, and I can tell you firsthand, it’s not easy.

So I’m not saying that to be insulting, I’m saying it because it’s true. You can dress it up however you want: Call it lifestyle, call it genetics, call it whatever makes it sound nicer. But at a national level, this is one of the biggest drivers of what’s going wrong in our healthcare system, and we know it.

Because it’s expensive. Really expensive.

We’re talking roughly $200 billion a year tied directly to obesity and that cost shows up everywhere…

It feeds into Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, higher cancer risk, sleep apnea and fertility issues. Now, there’s growing evidence it plays a role in cognitive decline as people age.

So when people talk about all these different health crises, it sounds like we’re dealing with a dozen separate problems.

We’re not.

Much of it stems back to the same root.

The system we’ve built is very good at treating what happens after the fact. There’s a prescription for this, a specialist for that, a procedure when things get serious. The system can manage the symptoms all day long.

What it doesn’t do is step in and deal with what’s causing those symptoms in the first place.

So, we keep pouring money into treating the consequences, year after year, while the underlying issue just keeps feeding more of them into the system.

If you don’t fix metabolic health in this country, none of the rest matters.}

{The First Real Fix for This Health Crisis

Don’t worry, I’m not here to just beat you over the head with how broken everything is.

Because for the first time in a long time, there’s something that doesn’t just manage the problem. GLP-1 drugs are changing everything.

I know people hear about these drugs and think it’s just another weight-loss craze, something for celebrities or influencers. I get the skepticism. I was skeptical too — at first. But once I actually looked at what these drugs are doing, it was a whole new story.

People are losing 20%, 25%, even 30% of their body weight. That’s not because they suddenly woke up with iron discipline, but because their cravings disappeared. Because it actually calms your cravings. Meanwhile, blood sugar stabilizes and your whole system starts operating differently.

And I’ll tell you, this is already way more widespread than people realize. If you know, you know. People look and feel different.

It’s not just the weight loss, either.

We’re seeing people with diabetes bring their numbers down. We’re seeing fewer cardiovascular issues among certain groups. Early signs even point to reduced cancer risks.

Not to mention the newer research on how GLP-1 drugs could improve conditions including kidney disease, inflammation, PCOS and perhaps even Alzheimer’s dementia.

It’s a game-changer that’s already improving people’s lives… And if this continues the way it’s starting, it will reshape the trajectory of the entire healthcare apparatus.}

GLP-1 drugs ~ there are four people in the company I work for that are on these shots. Insurance pays for it. They have all lost a lot of weight. But there have been some side effects for them too. I’ve thought about it. I’m not a fan of stabbing myself with a sharp object. There have also been issues with the insurance paying after an externed amount of time on the shots.

{Pay Now or Pay Forever

The catch is that all of this is expensive.

These drugs can run over $1,000 per month if you’re paying out of pocket, and many insurance plans don’t want to touch that. Not because these drugs don’t work — they know they work — but because paying upfront to make people healthier down the line doesn’t fit the status quo.

People switch insurance plans all the time. So why would an insurer take on the cost today if someone else might benefit from the savings later? The incentive just isn’t there.

Employers run into a similar problem. They see the long-term health benefits, but they’re staring at the short-term expense hitting their balance sheets now. That’s a tough sell.

But, at the risk of sounding like a politician, this does pay for itself… eventually.

You don’t need as many of the expensive interventions that come with diabetes, heart issues, cancer, all diseases tied to obesity. The pressure starts to ease.

And that trickles down. People feel better, they show up for work, they’re not dragging through the day or dealing with one health condition after another. The economic impact of that, according to Goldman Sachs, could boost the GDP by $120 billion, which is not inconsequential.

Employers should see the benefits of healthier employees, fewer long-term costs, less need to call out and miss a day of work. It’s just a question of whether they want to deal with the hit upfront.

Because what we’re doing now is basically paying for the same consequences — on repeat.

GLP-1 drugs could flip that. It puts the money toward actually fixing the problem earlier instead of chasing it forever.

And there really aren’t many things in healthcare that do that.

So if something lowers long-term costs, improves lives and even boosts the economy — but adoption stalls because no one wants to bear the upfront cost — what do you do?

You get the government to pay for it, of course.

I Hate Government Spending… Except This

I can already hear some of you saying: “Hold on, we’re trying to cut spending, not expand it.” Which is fair.

That should be the default position. There’s plenty of waste in this system that needs to go. Nobody is arguing for more bloat, just for the sake of it.

I’ll tell you this: I’m no doctor. But I do know a thing or two about national policy when it comes to healthcare.

If we took some of the tens of billions of dollars wasted on nonsense healthcare and directly subsidized GLP-1 medications… it would be a game-changer. And could fix this mess of an industry we’ve all just had to put up with all our lives.

By the way, this initiative is backed by Elon Musk, who got to see under the hood of the U.S. government firsthand.

Even after that, Musk himself said nothing could be better for public health in America than mass access to GLPs, subsidized by the federal government. And this is the DOGE guy!

I have to give Trump credit here because this is exactly the kind of thing he locks-in on, too. And in November, he signed a deal with drugmakers Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk to expand coverage and reduce prices for the popular obesity treatments Zepbound and Wegovy.

Coverage of obesity drugs will expand to Medicare patients starting this year, with lower prices also being phased in for patients without coverage.

Once Medicare starts covering obesity drugs in a meaningful way, I think everything changes.

Now, we’re not talking about the small group of Americans who can afford to pay out of pocket. We’re talking about coverage for millions of older Americans — the group which drives the majority of healthcare spending.

Medicare is where the money is. Not only that, but it’s where the pressure is. Because, let’s be honest, Medicare isn’t going anywhere.

No one’s getting elected telling seniors they’re going to get less care. That’s not how this works. So cutting costs by pulling back coverage isn’t a real option.

The only way to start fixing U.S. healthcare is if people need fewer medical interventions in the first place.

I, for one, am all for making America a little less fat… And while we’re at it, we might as well stop spending trillions of dollars managing preventable illness.

This isn’t some far-off idea. I’ve heard it directly from people in healthcare. One drug, in particular, is expected to be so effective it forces the issue. At a certain point, the pressure becomes hard to ignore and lawmakers may have little choice but to expand access, especially as the long-term savings start to speak for themselves.

This is our bread and butter here at Money & Power.

We look for the areas where Trump is actually involved and where policy is going to have a real-world impact. That’s kind of our whole approach… We figure out where decisions at the top are going to ripple through everything else.

With that in mind, I’m going to hand it over to Mason. He’s going to show you exactly how this plays out from here and which stock is the best bet on America’s (government-backed) skinny future.}

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