Fat Propaganda Roundup: Pharma Front Groups Demand Medicare Ozempic Subsidy

Documenting the meatiest, juiciest cuts of “fat acceptance” propaganda from corporate and social media.

Hotel hallways are too narrow, fatphobic, claims #bodypositive ‘travel influencer’

Via New York Post:

“In a video posted to her TikTok last month, Jaelynn Chaney listed several ways hotels can create “size-inclusive” amenities.

She said she is ‘on a mission to revolutionize the travel industry, and make it a more accessible, accepting, accommodating place for all,’ adding: ‘The needs of plus-sized travelers matter just as much as anybody else.’

‘We deserve an environment that respects our needs and body diversity,’ Chaney claimed.

Among her many demands were to ‘make elevators and hallways [more] spacious, to allow for easy movement of larger individuals, and those utilizing mobility devices.’

Chaney also suggested hotels raise their toilet seats and retrofit each room with handheld shower heads so bigger-bodied people can more easily wash themselves.”

Lends new meaning to “hot dog in a hallway,” no?

Prepare yourself for some delightfully uncouth fatphobia, boys and girls.

“She'll have another piece of pie
She'll have a double Reuben rye
She works hard at eating well
That's why I love her

She's got a couple of pony kegs
Her arms are bigger than my legs
And when she holds
Me I can't breathe

That's why I love her yeah,
I'm her butter, she's my bread
She's like a mobile waterbed
And when I get on top of her
I can't touch the mattress”
-NOFX, ‘Hot Dog in a Hallway’

          Related: #BodyPositive Terrorists Hijack Southwest Airlines

Pharma front groups demand Medicare subsidize Ozempic for Equity™

Via Axios:

“The explosive growth of Ozempic and other drugs known as GLP-1 agonists has led to greater recognition of obesity as a chronic condition rather than a lifestyle disease. But it's also sparked major concerns about the potential budget-busting costs of treating the more than 40% of Americans who are obese…

While many employers offer some coverage for obesity care, it's typically far more limited and comes with more restrictions around what they will pay for compared with other conditions.

The divide is especially stark with anti-obesity medications. 76% of employers report covering GLP-1s for diabetes, but only 27% do for weight loss, according to a 2023 survey by the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans.

Medicare has long had a prohibition on covering weight-loss drugs, and some states are clamping down on them.”

… And there you have it!

Axios took its sweet time cutting to the chase through all of the Equity™ talk, we’ve finally arrived at the bottom line: industry demanding the government subsidize its drug for the sake of Novo Nordisk profits.

Continuing:

“A group of health care organizations led by the Alliance for Women's Health and Prevention last month launched the EveryBODY campaign pushing for comprehensive coverage of obesity care, citing "misunderstandings" about obesity that it says led to insurance restrictions.

It came on the heels of the January release of an "Obesity Bill of Rights" by the National Council on Aging and National Consumers League, which calls out the medical system's disrespectful treatment of patients with obesity.”

Always with the “rights,” right? I analyze the endless proliferation of “rights” in the West, seemingly by the day, in juxtaposition to the distinct lack of such nonsense in the Far East, in my memoir, Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile.

          Related: Obesity Is a ‘Brain Disease,’ Claims ‘Expert’

You will be scandalized — shocked and chagrined — to learn of the kind of pharmaceutical industry front groups, which are cynically used to launder obvious rent-seeking through the veneer of do-goodery, behind the EveryBODY Covered scam.

Via PR Newswire:

“Partners of the EveryBODY Covered campaign represent top voices on women's health and obesity and bring with them the invaluable perspectives of the diverse communities they serve. Current partners include Alliance for Aging Research, American Medical Women's Association, Black Women's Health Imperative, Cancer Support Community, Gerontological Society of America, National Association of Nurse Practitioners in Women's Health, National Caucus and Center on Black Aging, Inc., National Consumers League, Obesity Action Coalition, and Society for Women's Health Research.”

Look what clause Axios buried deep in its story, in a lonely two-sentence bullet point, as if that’s all the exploration the clear ulterior motives at play deserve:

“Eli Lilly, which makes Mounjaro for diabetes and Zepbound for obesity, is a backer of the EveryBODY covered campaign.”

“This article/ransom note sponsored by…”

‘Body positive’ NPR doctor has schizophrenic conversation with self on over Ozempic for weight loss

Here’s the esteemed Dr. Mara Gordon, cognitive dissonance sufferer working through her ideological commitments in public, via NPR:

“So I like weight-inclusive. I like size-inclusive. I like weight-neutral. It's really medicine that tries to step away from our obsession with weight and body size in medicine…

I noticed sort of just a look that would come across people's faces when I would bring up their weight, just a sort of disengagement, a sense of distrust. Really kind of seemed like betrayal a lot of the time, that I was sort of turning the conversation to something that they weren't always there to talk about, and they had definitely already thought about themselves because everything in our culture was telling them to. And it sort of set me up not as their ally, but as an antagonist. And I noticed this over and over again, just that, you know, it wasn't helping. And it was actually causing harm…

So I had heard about the medicine Ozempic for many years. Since I've been in practice of medicine, I've been using it for years to treat diabetes. It was developed as a diabetes drug. And it is great. It can help protect your heart. It can help lower your blood sugar. It can help protect your kidneys. It really, really has a lot of benefits for patients who have diabetes or people who are really at high risk of cardiovascular disease. And in 2021, there was a big practice-changing article that came out in the New England Journal of Medicine that was a trial that looked at the use of Ozempic in patients who did not have diabetes. So it was basically patients who had higher BMIs who did not have diabetes - if you gave them Ozempic, would they lose weight? And the answer was yes…

And now it's pretty widely available, with some important caveats, which is in New Jersey, where I practice, Medicaid will not cover it for nondiabetic patients. So my practice is I would say vast majority publicly insured. And so basically, even if my non-diabetic patients want it, they can't get it. So whether or not you think Ozempic for weight loss is good, bad, neutral, complicated - I'm going to go with complicated - it's still not available to low-income folks in most of the United States. So there's that, which is just an important point to make. And I mean, immediately people started asking for it.

So I do prescribe Ozempic.”

You can read/listen to the self-contradictory, illogical gibberish if you like, but here’s the bottom line: this lady is attempting to reconcile two mutually exclusive tenets of her secular faith that have triggered inside of her an uncomfortable degree of cognitive dissonance.

They are:

·       “Morbidly obese flesh-hounds are beautiful creatures to be celebrated in all of their glory, not encouraged to lose weight by any means, including medication”

·       “The pharmaceutical industry and Public Health™ experts are never wrong, and Ozempic — like any patented drug that the hunky pharma sales rep who visits my office and doesn’t seem to mind my obvious menopause comes to sell me — is a godsend that ought to be made available under rule of law to all patients at public expense”

Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.

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