Canada's drug dilemma

A new study recommends nationalizing drug care into a single giant entity. It could save Canadians billions, but will it ever happen?

Canadians often boast about our public health care system. But in reality many of our medical bills are paid for privately. Dental care, mental health treatment, and most notably prescription drugs are bought out of pocket by Canadians, or funded through health plans. A new study recommends a massive restructuring of the drug system, saying that a single, national pharmacare program would save $10.7 billion out of the $25 billion Canadians spend on drugs each year.

A nation-wide drug program would be able to put pressure on the pharmaceutical industry to drive down its costs. The Montreal Gazette says these reduced profits for Big Pharma mean the plan will meet with strong resistance. “Quebec, Ontario, and British Columbia are all deathly afraid their carefully-nurtured pharmaceutical-industry manufacturing base could be eroded, or might even collapse, if a public drug plan is brought in,” says an editorial today. This is “a genuine worry” but it doesn’t outweigh the need to standardize our “incoherent, inefficient, and unfair” system.

An editorial in the Toronto Star sees another reason why the plan might not get much support. Nationalizing pharmacare would “transfer costs currently paid by the private sector, through employee drug plans, to government. That shift is unlikely to gain favour during a time of high federal and provincial deficits.”

The real problem, says a Globe and Mail editorial, is that no matter who pays, drug costs are increasing at an astonishing 10 per cent annually. Forget nationalization, “provinces need to act fast to overcome their jurisdictional concerns and implement” a plan to form one single drug-purchasing agency, which would drive down costs but leave private health plans intact. The editors suggest the savings should go towards “a national catastrophic drug plan.” Catastrophic drug care (life saving medicine that is unaffordable to a particular family) “holds a special place of shame in Canadian politics” because the government pledged to give all Canadians access to such medicine way back in 2003, but since then “almost nothing has been done.”