Michael Kolodziej, MD: How Payers Are Preparing for Biosimilars

Transcript:

Well, the way payers are going to approach biosimilars depends a little bit on the behavior of the reference product manufacturers.

Let’s say that the reference product manufacturers decide that they don’t really want to compete on price. In which case, I will predict that the commercial payers particularly—and that includes Medicare Advantage—will institute a policy similar to that around the use of generics. That is, they will require the use of the biosimilar first unless there’s a reason you can’t use a biosimilar.

But of course, in today’s world, we have the potential for manufacturers to undercut the price of the biosimilar product by offering a rebate. That is in fact already happening quite extensively in the inflammatory disease space; we will see what happens in the oncology space.