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About 11% of U.S. adults say they're currently taking a GLP-1 medication specifically for weight loss. That's up from just 3% in 2024. As GLP-1 use reaches new highs, more employers are grappling with whether the benefits of covering these medications justify their high costs. Some companies have chosen to embrace it. We spend about $250 million or more on GLPs, and that's up from zero, think about it, 4 or 5 years ago. $250 million you've spent? Yeah. The ones that are willing to make the investment, they're looking at their workforce and they think that there's a business reason, or they've concluded that there's a business reason to cover the medication for weight loss.
Employer-sponsored insurance is the largest source of health coverage for Americans under 65, covering more than 165 million people. For millions of workers, whether their insurance covers a GLP-1, can depend largely on what their employer decides to cover. My current employer does cover GLP access. We have a program where we go through an official training with like a coach, and they walk us through different steps. We have a curriculum that we listen to as well. That coverage could help companies recruit and retain workers. In one survey, 73% of Americans said that GLP-1 coverage was important for taking or staying at a job.
I think it's very important, especially if I were to ever look for another employer, that is something that I would definitely look for when it comes to that coverage. It just helped me be so successful within my career and my workspace. Although I'm not looking, it is definitely a factor for me staying in my role as well today. I think that employers that do make this investment are looking at their population of workers, and they either have a population that has high tenure and low turnover, or they want the population that has high tenure and low turnover.
GLP-1s may not just influence where people choose to work. Early research suggests that they could also affect who gets hired in the first place. While I was looking for a job, I ended up getting laid off and actually lost coverage, so I wasn't able to get GLP-1 through coverage. And so I took the chance on myself to purchase it on my own during that time. I lost a little bit of weight, but it definitely gave me the confidence and the energy to put myself out there for jobs. Feel more confident while I'm talking about my experience during the job search, and even going in for interviews,
just looking and feeling more confident about myself in the interview process as well. One working paper by Harvard economist Rebecca Diamond, which hasn't been peer reviewed, found women who are unemployed increase their likelihood of landing a job by 26.9 percentage points after 18 months of taking a GLP-1, compared with women who wanted to take the medication that hadn't. Meanwhile, women who were already employed didn't appear to work more hours or move into better jobs after starting GLP-1s.
One possible factor may be weight bias. Weight may play a bigger role when employers are making hiring decisions and forming first impressions than when evaluating workers they already know. I do think that me losing weight or feeling and looking thinner has helped me and gave me an advantage in the workplace when it comes to interviewing. Weight stigma certainly occurs for people across gender and race and age. But we typically see that in the employment context, discrimination and stigma are generally more pronounced for women than men. In our society, thinness has come to
symbolize very strong values. It symbolizes self-discipline and willpower and motivation. And if people have a higher body weight that doesn't conform to those ideals, they can be negatively stereotyped as lacking in those characteristics. And those assumptions can influence hiring decisions. So employers are not immune to those broader societal attitudes. Another recent working paper, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, looked at patients taking GLP-1s in Denmark. As a group of health economists, we were interested in, okay, well, there's a lot of trials that show that this drug improves metabolic health, also improves cardiovascular health, and also a few other health benefits.
We were interested in whether it also improves work capacity and whether there's some potential for there to be impacts on the labor market. Researchers found little evidence that taking a GLP-1 increase employment or meaningfully boosted income. However, they did find that GLP-1 treatment reduced long-term sickness leave, defined as illness-related absences lasting more than 30 days, by 17.3%. The mechanism here is, suppose that you were going to potentially have one of these very horrible health events that would take you out of work for a long time.
GLP-1s improve your health, help you avoid that health shock by some percent, and that requires you to no longer take that long-term sick leave in Denmark that you would have, had you not been on a GLP-1. In other words, they found the clearest labor market benefit might be helping some workers spend less time away from their jobs, and that has the potential to have significant economic consequences. In Denmark, that reduced sick leave saved employers and the public sector about $722 per year for each worker receiving treatment. Chronic diseases, including diabetes, which GLP-1 medications can treat, are estimated to cost the US an average of $900 billion annually in lost employee productivity.
However, there are some important caveats. Our findings applied directly to Denmark. In terms of how it might extrapolate to other countries, including here in the United States, it's a bit of a speculation. While researchers study how workers may benefit from being on GLP-1s. Employers are trying to figure out if it's worth the cost to cover them. GLP-1s are expensive for companies to cover. Nearly 8 in 10 employers surveyed said GLP-1s are driving an increase in their company's healthcare costs. We published a paper about a year ago, looking at the impact that covering GLP-1 medications would have on employer premium increases under a
number of different scenarios. And we found that it would amount to about a 1% to 2% increase. Now, that depends, right? We found scenarios where the premium increase would be close to double digits. And so far studies have not established that GLP-1 treatments pay for themselves through lower medical spending in the short-term. In response, more employers are reconsidering their coverage, with 10% of employers that currently cover GLP-1s for weight loss, saying they plan to drop that coverage in 2027. There's not an easy way to predict where employers are going to go. This market's changed so quickly in the past year that we should expect it to continue to change. There's new drugs on the horizon.
The pricing is changing. And on the one hand, you could argue that as the prices come down, employers are going to be more likely to cover it. But on the other hand, you know, the genie's already out of the bottle in terms of a lot of workers already paying for this out of their own pocket. And as the price comes down, employers may think, I don't need to cover it anymore because the prices come down and my employees can afford it. GLP-1s are already changing how millions of Americans manage their health, and early evidence suggests they could also change how people get hired and how much time they spend at work. For employers, the question is how much
those potential benefits are worth and how much they're willing to pay for them.
