What America pays
One month of Ozempic listed at $936 in the US and about $94 in the UK, France, Sweden and Australia. Same pen.
The comparison everyone quotes comes from one place: the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker, using list prices as of 30 June 2023. A month of Ozempic listed at $936 in the US, $169 in Japan, and about a tenth of the US price in Sweden, the UK, Australia and France.
Read the date, because this is the part most posts leave out: those numbers are three years old and the US one has moved twice since. Ozempic's US list price is $1,027.51 today. Novo Nordisk has also introduced self-pay prices - $199 a month as an introductory offer, then $349, and $499 for the 2 mg dose - and announced a new list price of $675 from 1 January 2027. Medicare negotiated $274.
So two things are true at once. The list-price gap is real and it is enormous. And almost no American pays the list price: insurers, employers and pharmacy benefit managers negotiate it down, and what an individual actually pays depends entirely on which of those is paying.
Why the gap exists at all: other wealthy countries set or negotiate one national price for the whole population. The US does not do that for most drugs, so the list price stays high and everything happens in private discounts underneath it.
There is no 2025 or 2026 update to the international table. If you see this comparison anywhere else, it is almost certainly the same 2023 data.
