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Alicia Shelley

Alicia Shelley

Board-certified Internal Medicine and Obesity Medicine physician at Wellstar Health System, 2x TEDx speaker, and host of the Back on Track: Achieving Healthy Weight Loss podcast.

Jul 27, 2026

14:20
Alicia, did you wanna add to that at all?
14:23
Yeah.
14:23
The one thing I wanted to add was that with the BALANCE program, it will give an option for Medicaid to opt in, um, for at the state level, but it's also we're, we're hitting a little bit of weight bias as well because not all Medicaid programs will opt in.
14:39
They had until June 30th to say whether they were gonna be opting in to BALANCE or not, so we haven't gotten the list of states who have decided to do it or, or, or to cover it or not.
14:49
And so that's also a, a barrier that we're seeing.
14:52
And I think because it's more individual to the state, that's why we're seeing it varied, where some states may cover, um, GLP-1s, like you said, just for, um, their FDA indication or medical condition indication, where others may cover it for weight.
15:08
Um, I live in Georgia, so our sister Alabama now covers it for, um, Medi- their Medicaid for GLP-1s.

7 MINS LATER

21:52
And so Alisha, are there any specific documentation strategies that you use to help get coverage for medications?

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