It's Time to Finally Kill the Zombies Comment on "Universal Pharmacare in Canada"

Joel Lexchin

doi:10.15171/ijhpm.2020.03

It's Time to Finally Kill the Zombies Comment on "Universal Pharmacare in Canada"

Int J Health Policy Manag. 2020 Dec 1;9(12):528-530. doi: 10.15171/ijhpm.2020.03.

Author

Joel Lexchin^{1

2

3}

Affiliations

¹ School of Health Policy and Management, Faculty of Health, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada.
² University Health Network, Toronto, ON, Canada.
³ Department of Family and Community Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada.

PMID: 32610770
DOI: 10.15171/ijhpm.2020.03

Abstract

The movement for a national pharmacare plan in Canada is growing, but at the same time the multinational pharmaceutical companies and their supporters are critical of such a move. The three major arguments that they make are that all that is needed is to "fill in the gaps," ie, cover those who currently are uninsured or underinsured, that private drug plans are superior to public ones because they cover a larger number of drugs and that Canada cannot afford pharmacare. This commentary examines each of these arguments and makes the case that none of them is valid and that it is time to get on with implementing pharmacare.

Keywords: Canada; Drug Expenditures; Formulary; Pharmacare; Pharmaceutical Industry.

© 2020 The Author(s); Published by Kerman University of Medical Sciences. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.