Medicare should cover prescription drugs
TheStar.com – Opinion/Editorials – Ontario Health Minister Eric Hoskins is right to push for making pharmacare an issue in the next federal election. Medicare should cover prescription drugs.
Jun 09 2015. Editorial
It would save Canadians billions of dollars, boost public health, and end an unfair system that denies people medicine on grounds of their age or where they work.
Yet creation of a national pharmacare plan to cover prescription drug costs for all Canadians still isn’t generating the attention necessary to make it a key issue in the coming federal election. That needs to change.
To his credit, Ontario Health Minister Eric Hoskins is pushing hard to put pharmacare where it belongs — at centre-stage in the national debate. He convened a roundtable of Canada’s provincial and territorial health ministers in Toronto this week to discuss national drug coverage.
Hoskins, who is a physician, correctly described this issue as “in the interest of our patients and of all Canadians.” As such, it was unfortunate that federal Health Minister Rona Ambrose did not attend the meeting.
Pharmacare represents the logical next step in the evolution of Canadian medicare. It was originally conceived as part of this country’s publicly funded health care system, with prescription drugs funded along with doctors’ fees and hospital bills. But this final chapter in medicare’s story remains unwritten.
That’s not the situation elsewhere. Indeed, Canada is the only country with a universal health care system that fails to cover the cost of prescription medicine. Drug funding here is a patchwork quilt of private plans and disjointed federal, provincial and territorial systems, and it doesn’t cover everyone.
Seniors are generally provided for, as are people on welfare. And about 60 per cent of Canadians are enrolled in private drug plans, largely through their workplace. But that leaves many with no protection from rising drug costs, especially the young, the self-employed, and people working for smaller businesses or engaged in “precarious employment.”
About one in 10 Canadians lack money to buy the medicines they need, resulting in needless suffering and aggravated illness. That’s hardly in keeping with the principle of universal access at the heart of Canada’s medicare system.
If that isn’t reason enough to support a national pharmacare plan consider this: such a program would almost certainly save billions of dollars. Multiple, well-researched studies have shown that costs could be dramatically slashed through bulk buying — concentrating the purchasing power of the entire country, public and private plans together. There would also be efficiency savings through eliminating duplicated legal, administrative and technical costs associated with Canada’s current mishmash of plans.
It all adds up to a health policy initiative that urgently needs to be explored. Hoskins is right. With a federal election looming on Oct. 19, pharmacare belongs on the national agenda.
< http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/2015/06/09/medicare-should-cover-prescription-drugs-editorial.html >
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