Big Pharma Is Fighting to Deny Canadians Access to Treatment
▻https://jacobinmag.com/2021/01/big-pharma-access-to-treatment-canada
Behind the pharmacare plan is a simple idea: no one in Canada should be denied access to necessary prescription drugs because of cost. Currently, despite spending over $1,000 per person per year on prescriptions, millions of Canadians have trouble getting the drugs they need. The average cost of prescriptions across the twenty-nine countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which mostly have pharmacare plans, is $700 per person per year.
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In every country that has a universal program for accessing doctors and hospitals, access to prescription drugs is part of the health care mix. Every country except Canada. Here, government covers about 42 percent of the cost of medicines, private insurance another 36 percent, and the rest comes out of people’s pockets. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
When Justice Emmett Hall released his iconic 1964 report paving the way for medicare, he envisaged that after universal coverage for doctors, the next step would be prescription drugs. But that next step has still not come.
Quebec’s Flawed Model
The Quebec model is frequently touted as the solution for people who don’t have drug coverage. In that province, all employers who offer health benefits must also offer drug coverage. For everyone else, the government steps in. Yanick Labrie, a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute, authored a report advocating the Quebec system for the rest of Canada.
On some measures, such as cost-related nonadherence, Quebec does relatively better than the Canadian average. But given the poor drug coverage in other provinces that is not the right comparison. For example, Quebec lags behind Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom — which all offer universal drug coverage — on nonadherence.
Similarly, a greater percentage of people in Quebec report spending more than $1,000 out-of-pocket on drugs, and total per capita spending on drugs in Quebec ($1,087) is substantially higher than the average in the rest of Canada ($912) and in countries with universal coverage ($826).