Brazil's health minister Alexandre Padilha said on Monday (28) that President Lula's government plans to hand out the injectable drugs known as weight-loss pens to "millions" of patients treated by the SUS, the country's free public health system, at an estimated cost of R$1.5 billion per year. The exact patient group, the start date and the average cost per treatment are all still undefined, Folha de S.Paulo reports.
What formally exists so far is more modest. On Thursday (24), the Health Ministry filed a request with Conitec, the commission that decides which treatments the public system covers, asking it to assess drugs based on semaglutide or liraglutide, GLP-1 analogues no longer under patent protection. The commission's technical staff is to propose which patients would qualify, such as people with a given degree of obesity, diabetes or other conditions, and calculate the real cost of distribution.
What the data shows
Ministry figures put obesity prevalence in Brazil at 25.7% in 2024, up from 11.8% in 2006. The request to Conitec adds two new arguments compared with earlier reviews: the first World Health Organization guideline on population-scale use of GLP-1 therapies, published in late 2025, and a 70% drop in the drugs' prices in Brazil in under a year as competitors arrived. There are now 25 such pens registered in the country, 14 of them in 2026 alone, among locally produced versions and generics.
In an interview with Folha, Padilha denied any electoral opportunism in the move, which had been announced days earlier as a campaign promise for Lula's reelection bid. He frames the medicine as part of broader care.
"We are not talking about adding an aesthetic miracle, but a medication that, combined with other actions on diet and physical activity, can certainly have a very positive impact, including on costs for the health system."
The minister argues, according to Folha, that the SUS purchasing scale and local production let the government negotiate bigger discounts from drugmakers and treat more patients within the R$1.5 billion-a-year estimate. The ministry also says it is running studies of these drugs in SUS patients through the Conceição hospital group in Porto Alegre.
Three earlier rejections
Conitec has rejected adding the pens to the public system three times in recent years. In August 2025 it turned down a request by Novo Nordisk, maker of Ozempic and Wegovy, estimating the offer would cost R$6.8 billion over five years to treat some tens of thousands of patients. The government's current estimate works out to R$7.5 billion over the same period, and the outcome depends on two open variables: the size of the eligible group to be defined by the technical staff and the final negotiated price.
In practice, nothing has changed yet for patients. The pens are not available in the public network, there is no set date for distribution to begin, and incorporation depends on Conitec's review. People seeking obesity treatment can get follow-up care at their neighborhood basic health clinic, and using these medicines requires a prescription and medical supervision, with an individual assessment of risks and benefits.