America's Benefit Specialist April 2023

BIOSIMILARS ARE INTEGRAL FOR MODERN HEALTHCARE

By Nathan Cassin Pharmacy Director Holmes Murphy

Today’s healthcare needs are deeply intertwined with issues like consistently increasing prices and inflation. As employers and insurance professionals alike know all too well, this has led to many who are struggling to obtain their prescriptions at a reasonable cost and, in turn, may not be able to maintain the necessary resources for optimal health. As employee benefits brokers, we also know that so much of our value comes from offering trusted solutions during cir cumstances like these, especially solutions that are modern and innovative, and provide needed expense relief. One of these newer solutions is biosimilars.

For clarity, biosimilars are medicines that are very close in structure and function to a biologic medicine. Essentially, it is almost an identical copy of the original drug, but it is man ufactured by a different company. In slightly more elaborate terms, these medicines are possible because biologic medi cations that lose patent protection do not go “generic” in the traditional sense because the drug chemistry of biologics in volves living tissue and complex molecules that are not easily or directly replicable from one manufacturer to another. Competing products to these original medications are called biosimilars because they are therapeutically equiv alent to the originator product and have a similar yet not exact replica of the biological makeup. When it makes sense to offer biosimilars in a health plan, they can help reduce the costs of all biosimilars for the originator product in the mar ket: Biosimilars typically launch at list prices that have been on average 15% to 40% lower than the originator product.

ENSURE THAT DRIVING THE LOWEST NET COST SHOULD BENEFIT THE PLAN SPONSOR AS WELL AS THE PATIENT.

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