MODEST STEPS TOWARD NATIONAL DRUG PLAN.
PHARMACARE
After 50 years of calls for pharmacare for all, the Liberal government is taking the first modest steps toward a national prescription drug plan.
In the federal budget unveiled Tuesday, the Liberals are pledging $35 million toward the creation of a new national drug agency that would act as a single negotiator for new prescription drug prices. The super drug agency would also be tasked with developing a national formulary — a list of essential drugs that should be available to all Canadians.
And, in one of the government’s biggest new spending measures, the Liberals are promising $1 billion to help cover the often crushingly high-cost of drugs for rare diseases.
But the budget was silent on the biggest question: will a national pharmacare program be a single-payer plan, or a “fill-in-the gaps” system, or a combination public/private scheme that’s far more industry-friendly?
Instead, the budget takes the first tentative steps by supporting recommendations in a skinny, eight-page interim report released earlier this month by a Liberal pharmacare advisory committee headed by former Ontario health minister Dr. Eric Hoskins.
The Hoskins council’s final report, due later this spring, will recommend one specific model, which would presumably inform a federal pharmacare strategy — the details of which the Liberals will likely leave for the campaign trail.
Canadians currently pay some of the highest drug prices on the globe. Between 2006 and 2017, the number of patented medicines costing $10,000 or more per year more than tripled, and now account for more than 40 per cent of patented medicine sales, compared to eight per cent in 2006.
Prescription drug spending in Canada ballooned from $2.6 billion in 1985 to $33.7 billion in 2018. The system, Hoskins has warned, is near the breaking point. More aggressive buying power could lower the cost of prescription medicines by up to $3 billion per year, according to government estimates.
Drugs for rare diseases are even more exorbitant, often exceeding $100,000 or more per year. One in 12 Canadians — two thirds of them children — suffer from a rare disease. Right now, only 60 per cent of treatments for rare disorders make it into Canada; most get approved up to six years later than the U.S. and Europe.
The Liberals say they would spend up to $1 billion over two years, starting in 2022, with up to $500 million per year ongoing, to help Canadians with rare disease pay for the drugs they need.
The new drug agency, working together with the provinces and territories, would assess the effectiveness of new drugs, negotiate prices and harmonize which drugs are covered across Canada.