Biogen Idec participates in public policy discussions that we believe benefit our patients and foster innovation and growth in the industry.
Biogen Idec supports public policy advocacy through our employee-funded political action committee, which provides funding to federal candidates working to advance the public policy goals of the industry. By law, these contributions are publicly disclosed on the Federal Election Commission’s website at www.fec.gov.
Our positions on two key issues for our industry are below:
Health Care Reform
Biogen Idec believes all Americans should have access to affordable, high-quality health care. We support health care reform that strikes the right balance between providing the best care for patients, controlling costs, expanding access to more Americans, and providing continued incentives for the research and development of new medicines. The Affordable Care Act, which was signed into law in March 2010, accomplished several of these goals. Our ActiveSourceTM Coordinators are helping patients understand and leverage the provisions of the federal law to gain access to health insurance coverage that enables them to afford not only our therapies but other services necessary for them to manage their diseases.
At the same time, there are some provisions in the law that may limit access to care for patients, such as decisions made by the Independent Payment Advisory Board. We continue to advocate for greater clarification on this and other issues to ensure that our patients are able to access and afford the care they need.
Biosimilars
We believe biosimilars, follow-on versions of original biological products, have an important role to play in providing high-quality drugs to patients at a lower cost. Moreover, from a business perspective, we expect biosimilars could provide a meaningful future revenue stream for our company, given our large-scale manufacturing capacity. To that end, we support provisions in the Affordable Care Act that will allow for the approval of biosimilars while protecting patient safety and promoting the continued innovation of the biotech industry.
