Secure
Our Meds
Generic and biosimilar medicines remain essential to treating millions of patients, whether battling COVID-19 or managing chronic health conditions. Yet getting these safe and reliable medicines to market and keeping them there can be a challenge and cannot be taken for granted. Together, we can take steps to secure patient access no matter what challenges may arise.
Secure Our Access
Secure Our Supply Chain
The U.S. pharmaceutical market is best secured when the United States becomes an increasingly important player in the global supply chain. More than 60 billion doses of generic medicines are currently made each year in the U.S., and that can be enhanced. By creating conditions to allow more essential medicines to be produced in the United States, America’s patients and our health care system will be better prepared to withstand any future pandemics, natural disasters or global supply chain disruptions.
To accomplish this, we must:
- Establish a list of essential medicines
- Provide grants and tax incentives to encourage expansion and new investments
- Ensure long-term price and volume contracts to protect against inexpensive imports
- Pursue regulatory efficiencies for manufacturing approvals
- Secure an International Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Agreement among allies
- Create export opportunities to enhance economic opportunity
Secure Our Markets
Current patient access masks the underlying fragility that’s threatening the sustainability of the U.S. generics and biosimilars industry. We can secure supply chains only if we secure markets for these medicines.
Generics and biosimilars face new challenges from unprecedented rates of price deflation (generics) and a growing number of government and payer policies that perversely reward the use of high-cost brands over generic or biosimilar competitors. Left unchecked, these challenges threaten the long-term viability of generic and biosimilar competition.
Generic drugs have long been proven to drive down health care costs and the nascent biosimilars industry shows similar promise. The global pandemic reinforces the necessity of sound economics and a healthy marketplace for these medicines.
Policies to achieve that goal, include:
- Repealing the Medicaid Generics Penalty
- Expanding the Strategic National Stockpile to include priority generic medicines
- Placing generics on lower cost-sharing formulary tiers
- Ensuring new generics are covered and available to seniors in Medicare
- Reforming Medicare to remove features that reward health plans for coverage of brand drugs instead of lower-cost generic or biosimilar medicines
- Putting an end to brand rebate traps.
- Stopping the “Most Favored Nation” proposal
- Increasing the add-on payment for providers who use biosimilars
- Encouraging biosimilar adoption through a shared savings program
Resources
Secure Our Meds illustrates challenges facing the generic and biosimilars industry and offer policymakers realistic, achievable solutions to secure the supply chain, strengthen markets and provide patient access now and in the future. Explore the data and analysis that informs the policy recommendations.
