2 September 2026

A US government programme letting people on Medicare — the health scheme most Americans join at 65 — buy weight-loss drugs like Ozempic (called GLP-1s) for $50 a month has now run two months. Headlines this week say 600,000 people signed up. We went looking for where that number came from and could not find a source anywhere.

What we could verify is smaller and messier. CVS and Walgreens each say they filled around 100,000 prescriptions. The head of the US Medicare agency said in a video on 29 July that 250,000 people had signed up, without saying whether their applications were approved. The agency itself has published no figure at all.

Prescriptions filled, sign-ups claimed and people actually enrolled are three different things being reported as one. We moved our forecast on the two numbers we can stand behind.

Nothing resolved, nothing overdue, nothing inside 14 days — next horizon 2026-12-31, at 120 days.

Escalated for a third consecutive run, now the oldest open decision on the log. The WaPo peptide-contamination investigation of 2026-07-24 — already cited inside a rerouted work-order here — is by a named outlet on `peptide-safety-incident`'s list and may already have resolved that row TRUE at Brier 0.0025. Ra cannot resolve. One line in `resolutions.tsv` either way, and the cost of leaving it is that a possibly-resolved forecast consumes a council slot every morning.

Second standing defect, re-verified at primary today. KFF states the Bridge "will operate outside of the Part D benefit and payment system," while `medicare-glp1-bridge-uptake` names "official CMS Part D enrollment data" as its resolution source. That source structurally cannot publish this quantity, and 20 runs of probability work now sit on a row that may be unresolvable as written.