Biosimilars Saved $12.3 Billion in 2023, a Fraction of Potential Savings

Craig Burton

Credit: Association for Accessible Meds

Savings from the use of biosimilar medicines reached $12.4 billion in 2023, according to the Association for Accessible Medicines’ and Biosimilars Council’s 2024 U.S. Generic & Biosimilar Medicines Savings Report.¹

“The good news: biosimilars continue to deliver quality care at lower prices,” Craig Burton, Executive Director for the Biosimilars Council, said in a statement.¹ “However, the biosimilars market faces severe challenges to its long-term sustainability. Swift legislative and regulatory action to safeguard biosimilar competition is vital.”

Overall, biosimilars have generated $36 billion in savings since their introduction to the market in 2015 and have repeatedly demonstrated their safety and effectiveness with no meaningful differences in clinical outcomes. To date, biosimilars have supported 495 million incremental days of therapy that patients would otherwise not have received and have overall been used in 2.7 billion days of patient therapy. Looking at overall savings through the use of generic and biosimilar medicines, it reached $445 billion in 2023 for America’s patients and the United States healthcare system.¹

Although generic and biosimilar prescriptions account for 90% of prescriptions filled in the U.S., they account for only 13.1% of the country’s spending on prescription drugs. In terms of overall healthcare spending, generics and biosimilar medicines represent only 1.2% of total spending in the U.S. Looking more specifically at healthcare savings, biosimilar usage generated $137 billion in savings in Medicare and $206 billion in commercial health plan savings.

“Challenges to biosimilar adoption, combined with the cost of development, are why more than 80 percent of brand biologics that are eligible for competition do not have biosimilars in development,” Burton added.¹ Without rapid action to streamline the FDA approval process, reduce abusive patent thickets, mitigate the unintended consequences of government price setting, and remove the perverse incentives of pharmacy benefit managers and brand drug rebates, patients will not realize the full value of biosimilars.”

Although biosimilars generated billions in cost savings, they still averaged less than 20% of the market share in 2023 amidst persistent challenges to biosimilar growth and cost-savings. The biosimilar report called on policymakers to continue to streamline the US FDA approval process for biosimilars, prevent patent thickets, and remove the incentives of brand drug rebates.

Other recent research looked at factors slowing or speeding up uptake of biosimilars and found that 1 or 2 biosimilars may not generate enough competition to speed adoption rates and policy levers are needed to speed up Medicare adoption, while looking specifically at infliximab biosimilars.²

Biosimilar uptake rose slowly with the first and second biosimilar releases, with small average annual increases in Medicare (3.2%), Medicaid (5.2%), and private insurance (1.8%) uptake from 2016 to June 2020. After the third biosimilar was released in July 2020, Medicaid (13%) and private insurance (16.4%) uptake increased greatly but Medicare uptake (5.6%) remained low. Medicare uptake continued to lag and by September 2022 was 24%, while Medicaid uptake was 43.8% and private insurance uptake was 38.5%. Notably, there was a delay in increased uptake for patients with private insurance after the introduction of the third biosimilar until January 2021.²

REFERENCES
1. 2024 Savings Report. 2024 U.S. Generic & Biosimilar Medicines Savings Report. AAM. September 5, 2024.
https://accessiblemeds.org/resources/blog/2024-savings-report
2. Biosimilar Medicines Saved $12.4 Billion in 2023. News release. AAM. September 5, 2024. https://biosimilarscouncil.org/news/biosimilar-medicines-saved-12-4-billion/
3. Roberts ET, Li J, Bansback N, et al. Patterns of Infliximab Biosimilar Uptake for Medicare, Medicaid, and Private Insurance from 2016 to 2022.
Arthritis Rheumatol. Published online July 30, 2024. doi: 10.1002/art.42963