Weight-Loss Drugs Are Gobbling Up Small Town Budgets

**Owen Tucker-Smith** (0:00)
Hey, it's Ryan.
Our colleague Imani Moise is here to guest host today's episode. Here it is.

**Imani Moise** (0:11)
About an hour outside of Boston, there's a picturesque small town surrounded by forested hills called Belcher Town. That's where Lisa Lassard Pearson lives.

**Lisa Lassard Pearson** (0:21)
My spouse and I affectionately call it Bel-share Town or B-town to get around the Belcher Town connotations.

**Imani Moise** (0:31)
Lisa sits on something called the Select Board. It's a small town version of a city council that serves Belcher Town's 15,000 people.
And after years of saving up reserves, the town had finally scraped together enough money for a few key infrastructure projects. Like repairing the roofs and the lights at the schools and updating the senior center.

**Lisa Lassard Pearson** (0:50)
These are basics. This isn't like fun, sexy projects. This is like the real work stuff that needs to be done to keep the town going.

**Imani Moise** (1:00)
But then came a surprise invoice.

**Lisa Lassard Pearson** (1:04)
I got a phone call from the town manager. It came to him first, and he immediately reached out to me.

**Imani Moise** (1:12)
The bill was from the town's health insurance administrator. It said Belcher Town owed an additional $900,000 in health insurance premiums, which is a major fiscal event for a town our size.
What was going through your mind at first when you saw these numbers?

**Lisa Lassard Pearson** (1:34)
I was shocked. I was absolutely shocked, and my first reaction is, how can they do that?

**Imani Moise** (1:51)
At first, the board didn't even know what they were being charged for.
But eventually, they learned that their health insurance administrator was facing massive deficits. A major cause? The growing use of GLP-1 weight loss drugs.

**Lisa Lassard Pearson** (2:06)
After all the careful planning we had done, and the months we spent working on the budget, it was devastating.

**Imani Moise** (2:18)
Belcher Town had no choice but to pay up.
Which meant it was faced with a big budget question. What's more important, health care or keeping the lights on?

**Lisa Lassard Pearson** (2:29)
I mean, what I want to really say is, Belcher Town is not unique. Belcher Town is just, as I say in Boston, wicked good example of what can happen to a small town.

**Imani Moise** (2:50)
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Imani Moise. It's Monday, June 29th.
Coming up on the show, how small towns are tightening their belts to cover weight loss drugs.

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**Imani Moise** (4:54)
Across the country, the cost of weight loss drugs for small town employees is starting to break the bank.

**Owen Tucker-Smith** (5:00)
Because for a small town of, you know, thousands of people versus millions of people, you know, all it takes is a few dozen people to be on these drugs for costs to start potentially rising quite quickly.

**Imani Moise** (5:13)
We called up our colleague, Owen Tucker-Smith, who answered from a hotel room in Missouri.

**Owen Tucker-Smith** (5:18)
I am on the economics team here at The Journal, so we were always roaming around the country looking for interesting economic stories, you know, towns and interesting conundrums, like for this story.