Re: 鈥淐anada inches toward national pharmacare,鈥� editorial, March 15.
I am concerned that your readers might have been left with the impression that universal pharmacare is unaffordable. This is incorrect and 鈥� with thousands of 91原创s becoming sicker and dying without timely access to medicine 鈥� dangerously so.
At the House of Commons health committee鈥檚 request, the Parliamentary Budget Officer conducted an independent review of the cost of folding pharmaceuticals into our medicare system. He used cautious assumptions and used Quebec鈥檚 formulary (the widest in Canada) as a basis.
Using 2016 as a base year, he calculated that comprehensive coverage in a public system would save 91原创s at least $4.2 billion that year and every year thereafter. More importantly, these savings would be spread over every stakeholder group, including patients, the private sector and all levels of government.
The PBO calculated that as a nation in 2016 we spent $24.6 billion on pharmaceuticals that would be eligible for pharmacare coverage. This was paid for by the provinces ($11.4 billion), the private sector ($9 billion), patients ($3.6 billion) and the federal government ($650 million).
With pharmacare, we would have needed to spend only $20.4 billion. That would be funded by keeping the governments at their current contributions ($12 billion), and leaving the private sector to spend $8.4 billion. So, universal, comprehensive and public pharmacare wouldn鈥檛 cost the federal or provincial governments a nickel in extra spending, the private sector would pay less and patients鈥� out of-pocket costs would be eliminated entirely.
Don Davies, MP
NDP critic for health
