Outside OHIP — another way?
MPP says committee should see how other countries handle dire medical cases
Ontario can learn from other countries how to better serve patients diagnosed with rare or life-threatening diseases who seek experimental treatments or drugs not covered by OHIP, says an MPP hoping for approval for an advisory committee to find ways to improve the system.
“We deal with this all the time,” Progressive Conservative MPP Lisa MacLeod (Nepean-Carleton) said in an interview. “What’s frustrating is that it’s not until somebody comes up to Queen’s Park and fights it that they get the treatment, either because they’ve garnered enough media attention” and been able to fundraise the money, “or the government reverses itself because it comes politically unpalatable.
She said the advisory committee she’s proposing in her motion, to be introduced Thursday in the legislature, would look at how places like Australia, New Zealand or the United Kingdom handle extreme, “catastrophic care” cases — typically through a special panel that evaluates requests for unapproved treatments or drugs, or a special fund set aside for health ministries to access quickly so families aren’t forced to pay out-of-pocket.
Ontario Health Minister Eric Hoskins said the province makes decisions “on the provision of care based on best practice and . . . an evidence-based approach. We rely on our clinicians and our experts in the medical field to provide us with that advice, and make recommendations in terms of the services and procedures that should be provided” that will have benefits.
While most of those are provided in the province, “if a recommendation is made by a clinician with sufficient expertise in the area to a service or procedure that’s not available in Ontario, we will make that service or procedure available” by paying for it in another province or the United States, he added.
He said some 96 per cent of out-ofprovince applications that come before the province are approved; if patients are turned town, “I think there’s a good reason (for it).”
“I think Ontarians would expect us to take an evidence-based approach to base our decisions” and approval in cases where there’s a benefit to the procedure.
MPP France Gélinas, the NDP’s health critic, said she agrees with that, but “how do you build a robust body of evidence when you only have a few cases throughout the entire province? How do you build a robust body of evidence when there is no research being funded in a particular area? These people end up here and it’s wrong — they should not have to be coming to Queen’s Park, begging for their lives.”
“There are just so many examples,” of patients who find themselves scrambling to pay for their treatments, she said. “So if there are so many examples, it means something is not going right.”
Shae Greenfield, a spokesperson for Hoskins, said “the minister is always prepared to look at other jurisdictions to see if there are ways Ontario can improve our health-care system.”
Last year, Progressive Conservative MPP Michael Harris (KitchenerConestoga) called for an all-party select committee to travel the province, consulting patients and doctors to improve the system for those with rare diseases. It was voted down earlier this year.