Dr Eric Tichy Details Why More State Biosimilar Bills Are Needed

Eric Tichy, PharmD, MBA, vice chair of pharmacy formulary at the Mayo Clinic Health System, discusses the importance of state legislation to boost biosimilar access and uptake.

Transcript:

You had the opportunity to provide comment to Minnesota congressional leaders about HF 1516, a bill aimed at increasing patient access to biosimilar. Could you explain what this bill is and why more bills like this are needed?

Tichy:

So, one of the reasons for this bill is that we found there were some barriers to biosimilar implementation. We've seen this in our experience, and it's been noted by other organizations and other health care leaders. One of the biggest barriers is actually sometimes you run into health plans that will prefer an innovator product. And it may be because they have some kind of rebate or some other situation that makes them prefer the innovator product.

We've actually run into scenarios where that innovator product is 3 times more expensive than the biosimilar product. We felt that we needed some incentives to push the practice to be able to use biosimilars, like our providers wanted to use biosimilars, our patients wanted to use a biosimilar, and we were having payers that weren't allowing us to do that.

There's also some of those logistical issues with stocking products. This bill would help get biosimilars treated more similarly to how we treat generic drugs, where we have the dispensing organization decide which product gets used. The payers don't micromanage which generic drug that we use, and the payers do a lot of important things to save cost. And we would just say, trust us to sort of drive to the lowest cost, we'll pass that on. And you can focus on other things where you can bring value to health care and reduce overall health care costs.