Abstract
Drug pricing has increase to the point where many Americans are unable to afford prescriptions for both long- and short-term diseases. Within the last decade, U.S lawmakers have changed legislation so that biosimilars can be added into the drug market in hopes of creating affordable products. Biosimilars allow more options for consumers and add increased competition for manufactures which should decrease the overall price of the original biopharmaceutical the biosimilar is modeled after. In current research, the impact of biosimilars within the European Union has been investigated heavily, but the US approved biosimilars much later and there is less information on how the market is adapting. Publications that have centered around using US drug pricing have fixated around Medicaid and Medicare costs and have failed to create a consensus on the impact of biosimilars. In this report, pricing data was pulled from the Veterans Affairs Administration and analyzed. The goal of the analysis was to determine the impact of introducing biosimilar products on biologics by looking at price change in reference drugs. A Consumer Price Index was applied to all datasets to account for difference in income and multilinear regressions were used to analyze if biosimilars are decreasing or increasing the price of drugs they are referring to. Within the report there is limited evidence to indicate that biosimilars have decreased the price of biologics which indicates the laws changed are not effective. The discussion section will determine potential reasons as to why policy changes are not helping decrease the price of biopharmaceuticals.
Library of Congress Subject Headings
Biopharmaceutics--Economic aspects; Pharmaceutical biotechnology--Economic aspects; Drug development--Economic aspects
Publication Date
12-15-2023
Document Type
Thesis
Student Type
Graduate
Degree Name
Science, Technology and Public Policy (MS)
Department, Program, or Center
Public Policy, Department of
College
College of Liberal Arts
Advisor
Eric Hittinger
Advisor/Committee Member
Qing Miao
Advisor/Committee Member
Javier Espinosa
Recommended Citation
Sitter, Olivia, "Evaluating the Impact of Biosimilars in the Drug Market" (2023). Thesis. Rochester Institute of Technology. Accessed from
https://repository.rit.edu/theses/11648
Campus
RIT – Main Campus
Plan Codes
STPP-MS
