Don’t buy pharma’s lies about a universal pharmacare program

 

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STEVE MORGAN
Times Colonist
MAY 9, 2019 12:53 AM

As universal pharmacare gets closer to reality for Canada, drug companies are ramping up their false rhetoric. They say a universal, public pharmacare plan would result in worse access to medicines, higher costs and less innovation in Canada. Don’t believe them.

Canada is the only high-income country with a universal, public health-care system that does not include universal, public coverage of prescription drugs. Instead, we have an incomplete patchwork of private and public drug-insurance plans financed and managed separately from our medicare system. That is insane.

Contrary to pharma’s claims, our private-public drug-insurance system performs worse than universal, public pharmacare systems in terms of access, costs and innovation. Here’s why:

The incomplete nature of our patchwork of drug plans leaves about one in five Canadians uninsured. As a result, about one in 10 Canadians skips prescriptions simply because of the out-of-pocket costs.
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Each year, nearly 400,000 Canadians use additional medical and hospital services — services we all pay for — because they skipped prescriptions owing to out-of-pocket costs. More than 300 Canadians die prematurely each year as a result.

That alone should make universal pharmacare a national priority — an emergency.

But there are even more problems with our private-public drug-insurance system. For example, our heavy reliance on work-related private drug plans places strains on Canadian businesses. Continue reading

Strategy ‘dramatically exceeds’ target for more MRI exams in B.C.: minister

Health Minister Adrian Dix says two private MRI outpatient clinics were purchased by Fraser Health as part of the strategy. (File photo)

Health Minister Adrian Dix says two private MRI outpatient clinics were purchased by Fraser Health as part of the strategy. (File photo)

Almost 44,000 more specialized diagnostic exams have been completed across British Columbia in the first year of a new health care strategy and Health Minister Adrian Dix says that amounts to an “extraordinary achievement.”

 
The B.C. Surgical and Diagnostic Imaging Strategy includes a provision to operate magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, machines around the clock, with more than 233,000 exams done in the first year of the initiative.
 
When compared with the year before, Dix says their strategy “dramatically exceeded” the initial target of 37,000 scans.
MRI scans are vital to the diagnosis of soft tissue damage such as brain tumours, strokes or dementia and past wait times have extended a year or more.
 
While the minister didn’t have figures on how this has reduced the delays, preliminary data from Northern Health shows certain wait times dropped to 29 days from 57.
 
Dix says two private MRI outpatient clinics were purchased by Fraser Health as part of the strategy and the model could be applied to efforts to cut other health care wait times.
 
At the start of this year, 10 of B.C.’s 33 MRI machines were running around the clock, compared to one in August 2017, while 17 were running more than 19 hours a day, scanning patients at all hours of the day and night.

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