Most Canadians support pharmacare

Within Canada’s “universal” health-care system, there are important health treatments that, except for high-income earners to access privately, are universally inaccessible. Morally reprehensible is that the populace’s health seems to come second to maximizing health-industry profits.

Meantime, the only two health professions’ appointments for which Canadians are fully covered by the public plan are the two readily pharmaceutical-prescribing psychiatry and general practitioner health professions. Such non-Big-Pharma-benefiting health specialists as counsellors, therapists and naturopaths, etc., are not covered a red cent.

In Canada, somewhat similar to the U.S., people’s health comes second to maximizing profits, in particular those amassed by an increasingly greedy pharmaceutical industry. Resultantly, we continue to be the world’s sole nation that has universal healthcare but no similar coverage of prescribed medication, however necessary.

Not only is medication less affordable, but other research has revealed that many lowincome outpatients who cannot afford to fill their prescriptions end up back in the hospital system as a result, therefore costing far more for provincial and federal government health ministries than if the medication had been covered. Ergo, in order for the industry to continue raking in huge profits, Canadians and their health, as both individual consumers and a taxpaying collective, must lose out big time.

A late-2019 Angus Reid study found that about 90 percent of Canadians — including three quarters of Conservative Party supporters specifically — support a national pharmacare plan. Another 77 percent believed this should be a high-priority matter for the federal government. The study also found that, over the previous year, due to medication unaffordability, almost a quarter of Canadians decided against filling a prescription or having one renewed.