National pharmacare plan to cover diabetes treatments, birth control to start

But we begin in Ottawa on the first steps today towards that National pharmacare plan the liberal government tabled legislation to set up the first phase of that program it’ll cover birth control and diabetes medication for every Canadian with a health card earlier Health Minister Mark Holland explained why the plan will start with

The focus on those areas there are more than 9 million women of reproductive age in Canada that’s nearly a quarter of the population unintended pregnancy can be cause uh a cause of a Cascade of health and economic impacts both for individuals and for society having safe reliable birth control is essentially

Freedom and it is safety however these costs continue to be a barrier today we’re taking action to remove that barrier talking about patients who are making a decision about whether or not they take their diabetes medication or whether or not they go and get the food

That they need for their family and what happens to that person who doesn’t take their medication right they wind up potentially with an amputation with a stroke with a heart attack they walk out with potentially kidney problems that’s not just a matter of social justice imagine the cost

Involved in that to our health system and I don’t think that’s the kind of country we want to have cbc’s Jenice McGregor is in Ottawa and has more on the announcement and how the new plan will actually work essentially trying to pick things to start that affect a a broad number of

People uh we’ve been talking about the 4 million Canadians that live with managing diabetes the millions of others that sort of are in a pre-diabetes kind of risk uh state may need uh these medications at some point and then you heard uh Mark Holland there talk about

The 9 million uh women uh in Canada who I are estimated anyway to to benefit from contraception becoming free under this program um so so this is not like some Fringe thing that affects only a couple thousand people I think the intention uh on the government’s part is

To sort of use some early successes hopefully and proving the benefit of this the popularity of this as a firm foundation then to sort of build uh down the road but of course uh coverage is expensive um they are not starting uh with necessarily the priciest uh drugs

Out there although so if you look at the actual design of what’s in this legislation and the things the government had done to date probably important sort of as our our colleagues come out of the technical briefing and we sort of go through what’s actually uh in the bill that was tabled today

Important to understand there’s a few different aspects to this they are setting up what they call the Canadian drug agency it’s going to keep a a national formulary a list of of drugs that the the government I sort of uh makes available uh to Canadians they are

Going to be engaging in something that started off as an initiative at the premier’s level between provinces and territories this idea of bulk purchasing to save a lot of money so this kind of central agency the Canadian drug agency would sort of keep the list of of drugs

For for available in Canada and and seek to bulk purchase that and then of those kind of categories of drugs on that list they’re pulling out these two and offering uh Universal covers through a Single Payer system across the board to start now separately from this they’re

Also offering some help to people who uh need more rare uh medications because of the the nature of sort of a a a a rare disease if you will or or Cutting Edge uh treatments uh things that are very very helpful for a very small number of people and are often prohibitively

Expensive because they are uh not rolled out in in a mass way um there is a separate program but also part of this bill for those those people uh who do need sort of the help for the the rare diseases and and those Unique Kind of pharmaceutical uh Solutions so all these

Things uh part of this bill uh now they intend to pass with the assistance of the NDP the pre huge bill for putting in a universal single pair of system was for a long time the reason a lot of people thought other governments hadn’t acted sooner finally Health Minister Mark

Holland there I said that this could be about1 and A5 billion dollars to add these two classes of drugs um that will be very interesting to people to hear that cost estimate floated cost estimate floated ahead of what we know will be a very detailed set of negotiations with

Provinces and territories across the country all of whom have a patchwork quilt of different coverages some of them that already sort of include particular measures for different age groups of people some of them already covering contraception in certain C ways or certain kinds of contraception or certain kinds of diabetes uh assistance

So um he he was really clear that he didn’t want to give an estimate for a long time uh for how much this initially was going to cost uh ahead of those conversations but this is a very different strategy they’re using on pharmacare than they use with child care

With child care they came out with a big pot of money and then they went to the provinces and said okay let’s work out deals for how we’re going to spend this and how this is going to work in your jurisdiction here they’ve worked at the

NDP they’ve said how they want it to work they’ve said what they want to cover and then they’re going to the provinces to figure out sort of I guess how much money they need to make this happen so a very kind of different strategy uh here and I don’t want to

Lose sight of that cbc’s Janice McGregor in Ottawa

Health Minister Mark Holland released the long-awaited details of the federal government’s pharmacare plan on Thursday, with a commitment to cover some diabetes treatments and contraception.

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