Four in five American adults have heard of these drugs. Fewer than one in ten has used one. And among people who actually tried to get one, half did not [1]. That last figure is the entire reason a self-pay price desk exists — the gap between a published price and a filled prescription that runs through the sellers publishing two prices — and it is the first time this desk has had a national number for it.
Among the 1,883 respondents meeting FDA clinical eligibility — a BMI of 30 or more, or 27 with at least one comorbidity — 13.4% had used a GLP-1 in the previous three years. Among those not meeting those criteria, 4.0% had. Awareness across the whole cohort was 81.6%, so the gap between knowing about these drugs and getting one is very wide.
Two facts about the data set the limits. It is self-reported rather than drawn from prescription records, so it captures what people say they did. And it is a single snapshot from December 2023. Both supply and self-pay pricing have moved since then, which is why this desk re-walks its own price rows rather than citing old ones — the reasoning in why falling prices and annual plans do not mix.
One number deserves reporting without commentary. Use among people who did not meet the FDA criteria was 4.0%. That is what the respondents said. How any of them obtained a prescription, and whether the criteria were applied at all, is not something this study measured and not something this desk will guess at.
What a buyer can take from this is that failing to get one of these drugs is the median experience, not a personal failure. Roughly half of the attempts in a national sample ended without the medication. If you are comparing self-pay prices at all, you are already past the step where most people stopped — which is the step this desk built the headline-versus-billed price comparison for.