Free Ozempic? These Medicare Advantage Companies Are Quietly Offering Huge Savings

$0 Doesn’t Mean Hassle-Free

Even when a plan lists Ozempic at $0, that price may come with strings attached. For example, Humana’s Gold Plus plan offers Ozempic for $0, but requires prior authorization from the insurer and may impose quantity limits. 

Prior authorization and step therapy are common in Medicare Advantage plans for high-cost drugs like Ozempic. Under prior authorization, you must receive approval from your insurer to get a prescription covered. With step therapy, you must try a lower-cost prescription for your medical issue first before the insurer will approve a more expensive one. In some cases, even that might not guarantee access to Ozempic. Plans may prefer policyholders to use rival drugs like Mounjaro.

Pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), the intermediaries that negotiate drug prices on behalf of insurers, play a significant role in determining which drugs are favored. PBMs often encourage competition among pharmaceutical companies, such as GLP-1 medications (a class that includes Ozempic, Mounjaro, and Wegovy, used to manage type 2 diabetes and obesity).

“They can go to the maker of Ozempic, Novo Nordisk, and say, ‘If you want to be our preferred GLP-1, we need a bigger discount or we’ll go with a competitor,’” said Geoffrey Joyce, director of health policy at the USC Schaeffer Center.

If one company offers a bigger rebate, a PBM may be more likely to favor its drugs. That means your access to Wegovy or Mounjaro might depend on which manufacturer has a better deal with your insurer’s PBM. And if a drug is not your PBM’s preferred pick, it might get placed on a higher cost tier or come with more administrative hurdles to get it covered.

Comparing Medicare Advantage Drug Coverage

Despite these price differences, many Medicare enrollees don’t choose plans based on how they cover specific drugs, Joyce said.

“We have a lot of empirical evidence that says people choose plans based on the premium and whether their doctors are in-network,” he said. “It’s a little harder for people to be price shoppers on the drug side when they’re choosing an MA plan.”

Comparing costs can be especially challenging for drugs like Ozempic, which may fall into a gray area because it’s often covered for diabetes but also sought off-label for weight loss, which Medicare typically won’t pay for.

But to get a baseline, you can follow these steps to compare drug prices across different Medicare Advantage plans:

1. Go to Medicare.gov/plan-compare
2. Enter your ZIP code and select “Medicare Advantage Plan (Part C)”
3. When prompted, add your drugs. For example, you can search for “Ozempic.” 
4. Choose the dosage and frequency.
5. Choose up to five local pharmacies to compare pricing.
6. Browse the list of available plans. Click “Plan Details,” then scroll to the “Drug Coverage” section.
7. Compare the monthly and annual costs for your drug at each pharmacy.

How We Got the Numbers

We used Medicare.gov’s plan finder to compare how much Ozempic, Mounjaro, Wegovy, and Zepbound cost under Medicare Advantage plans in three populous ZIP codes: 33012 (Miami), 77084 (Houston), and 11215 (New York). For each area, we checked the price of a monthly supply at the closest CVS and Walgreens under the lowest-cost plan offered by each insurer for the following amounts:

• Ozempic: 2 milligrams
• Mounjaro: 2.5 milligrams
• Wegovy: 1 milligram
• Zepbound: 2.5 milligrams

If an insurer didn’t operate in all three ZIP codes, we used a similar-sized ZIP in another state–for example, 90011 in Los Angeles for Kaiser. Also for Kaiser, we checked prices at a Kaiser pharmacy because its plans limit which facilities members can use. We did not include prices for Wegovy and Zepbound in our story because they weren’t covered under the plans and ZIP codes we checked.

These prices reflect mid-2025 data and may not represent costs nationwide.