Matt dives into a specific healthcare topic to help those in the industry, and those outside of it, better understand the market drivers causing today’s healthcare challenges.

$149 per month self-pay.

$25 commercial copay.

$50 Medicare Part D starting July 1.

No injection. No food restrictions. No water restrictions.

Patients on the highest dose of Foundayo lost an average of 27.3 pounds. Patients on placebo lost 2.2 pounds.

For 20 years, the pharmaceutical industry told patients that drug pricing reflects the cost of innovation. Lilly just demonstrated something else. Pricing reflects a choice. They chose access.

The question every other company needs to answer today is why they chose differently.

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The ATTAIN-1 clinical trial delivered more than weight loss numbers. Patients on Foundayo showed reductions in cardiovascular risk, improvements in LDL and triglycerides, and meaningful drops in systolic blood pressure. This is a therapy that changes more than the number on the scale.

But the clinical story is only half the picture.

For the past three years, the GLP-1 market operated on a specific set of assumptions. Payers would resist coverage. Patients would struggle with affordability. Companies would spend years grinding through utilization management battles. Every launch strategy accepted these conditions as fixed.

Lilly examined the same assumptions and built a strategy to make them irrelevant.

ELAVAY data consistently shows one pattern across top-performing companies in advocacy trust and patient access. They invest in access infrastructure before launch, not after the denial letters start piling up. They build direct patient channels. They price with the assumption that volume drives long-term commercial success, not per-unit margin.

The companies ranked lowest on ELAVAY treat patient access as a downstream problem. They launch first and patch access issues later.

Lilly launched Foundayo with access infrastructure already built. LillyDirect handles distribution. Self-pay pricing at $149 eliminates the insurance gatekeeping. Commercial copays starting at $25 remove the affordability barrier inside the covered market. Medicare access at $50 extends the reach to a patient population most companies would never reach at list price.

This is what the access-first playbook looks like when it runs at full scale.

Novo Nordisk built the GLP-1 category. Ozempic and Wegovy created the market. But the pricing and supply constraints that defined the first wave created a perception problem that advocacy organizations documented in ELAVAY surveys for three years running.

Patients who could not access or afford injectable GLP-1s did not blame the science. They blamed the companies.

Foundayo changes the game on three fronts simultaneously.

Every competitor still planning a launch around traditional payer negotiations and standard copay structures is planning for a market that Lilly just retired. The old playbook relied on the assumption that patients would tolerate friction. Lilly proved that patients will not. They proved that listening to patients can be your competitive advantage.

ELAVAY: Advocacy Intelligence data show a consistent pattern among companies that earn the highest scores in patient access and advocacy trust.

They fund access infrastructure as a launch investment, not a post-launch repair. They build direct channels to the patient rather than relying on traditional insights generation. They treat the patient voice as the Voice of a Client, someone they can learn from early and often. They treat pricing as a volume lever, not a margin protection tool. They bring the advocacy community into the strategy room as a strategic input, not a stakeholder to manage at arm's length.

The companies at the bottom of the ELAVAY rankings do the opposite. They price for margin, launch for investors, and scramble for access after the prescriptions start bouncing.

The Foundayo launch is the most visible example of the access-first playbook operating at scale. The template now exists. Every commercial leader in the industry can study it, copy it, or watch their competitors beat them to it.

When one company demonstrates that pricing for access works at a commercial scale, the excuse for not doing it disappears.

Every commercial leader now has a benchmark. Every market access director has a point of comparison. Every advocacy function head has a question sitting on their desk.

When Lilly prices a breakthrough therapy at $149 a month and builds a direct patient delivery channel, what is your excuse for not doing the same?

The 2026 ELAVAY Report launches in May. It ranks the advocacy performance of companies across pharma and biotech and shows exactly which organizations are building access-first strategies and which ones are still protecting yesterday's pricing models.

If you want to understand where your organization stands on access, trust, and advocacy performance relative to the companies actually executing, book a call with me. I will walk you through the data and show you where your team ranks.

Book time with me here: https://api.leadconnectorhq.com/widget/bookings/11-with-matt-toresco

The pricing question is settled.

The access question is next.