Health Subcommittee Hearing on Lowering Costs for Patients: The Health of the Biosimilar Market
House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health
2025-04-08
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Source: Congress.gov
Participants
Transcript
The subcommittee will come to order. Good morning, and thank you to the witnesses here today to discuss biosimilars can lower costs for patients and provide greater and more affordable access to care. As we discussed in our first subcommittee hearing of this Congress in terms of our national issues and chronic disease epidemic, it's extremely costly just in terms of the healthcare system. our fellow American patient. In fact, 90 percent of our $4.5 trillion in health care costs last year was tied to chronic diseases. It's hard to believe, but they're saying 90 percent. Forty-two percent of Americans have two or more chronic diseases, such as diabetes, cancer, heart disease. Today's hearing is an important step in lowering health costs and improving our outcomes. and we must continue to find longer-term ways to improve the health of our patients and our nation. Thankfully, we live in an era of innovation where researchers and manufacturers are developing new and complex treatments and cures. Medicines such as cell and gene therapy, these drugs have improved millions of lives for patients with Alzheimer's and other diseases. We also are able to bring these treatments to patients through lower-cost biosimilar options. Since entering the market in 2015, biosimilars have saved the entire healthcare system over $23.6 billion. Within the medical program, the biosimilars reduced Part B spending by $4.5 billion. in 19-2020 alone. Biosimilars launched at prices up to 35 percent lower than branded drugs, and they can drive further savings when they compete with drugs already on the marketplace.
The marketplace competition lower costs for all patients in the insurance markets will provide safe and effective treatments options for patients. Biosimilars also help increased drug supply availability and have been used in nearly 700 million days of patient therapy. Still significant work needs to be done to ensure this in terms of moving forward. This ranges from making our drugs reimbursement systems work correctly to incentivize markets competition to improve patient providers' education and awareness. over our health care system stands to save 181 billion over the next five years by reducing the barriers to biosimilar cemeteries adoption and i hope this hearing could help accelerate that goal we are about to hear from a great group of folks who represent many aspects of biosimilar market including those involved first-hand the care delivery and those working behind the scenes to bring about these drugs to the marketplace. I look forward to working with all of our colleagues with Congress to reduce the impact of chronic disease epidemics by making innovative treatments more accessible and affordable throughout the biosimilars. So with that, I want to introduce the chair. From the gentleman from Texas, Mr. Doggett, thank you.
Well, thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I hope this is really the first of a number of hearings to explore the waste and abuse that is rampant in the pharmaceutical industry. Few industries are so zealous in doing all they can to prevent competition, few are so overpaid, and few have invested so effectively in this Congress to maintain their privileged position and to avoid the slightest accountability. All of this has to be considered in connection with Trump's doge attack on science, on research, on the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Institutes of Health. He is not eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse there, but rather settling old scores, accepting ludicrous conspiracy theories, and building a body count of how many public servants he can fire. The health of our nation will suffer from this wrongdoing. Consumers will be paying even more for less as innovative research is decimated by this recent Trump-Musk rampage. With no explanation provided, for example, support was abruptly terminated for the groundbreaking vial research that has been conducted by award-winning scientist Dr. Jason McClellan and his team at the University of Texas in Austin. Called one Monday and told their project ended the next Monday with no explanation. Elsewhere funds have been cut for clinical trials upon which patients rely in seeking life-saving cures for cancer, Alzheimer's, and more. And exports, of course, have been removed randomly from the FDA and the NIH that are essential participants in the development and approval of new therapies, all thanks to DOJA's abrupt layoffs in a disgraceful display
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