3 July 2019 - Under the approach used by Kaiser Permanente, say the authors, in which oncologists have salaried incomes and are not reimbursed on a relationship to drug price, far higher generic uptake has been observed.

There is no question that the cost of oncology drugs is a contributor to untenably high healthcare spending in the United States. While lower-cost generics and biosimilars may appear to be a natural solution to the problem of high prices, these agents have struggled to gain ground in cancer care.

In an editorial published on the Health Affairs blog, Sharon Levine, MD; Anthony Barrueta; and Polly F. Webster, all of whom are affiliated with Kaiser Permanente, argued that the US market needs to realign its incentives in order to promote the use of these agents and help bring down the cost of anticancer therapy.

Read Center for Biosimilars article