Public health professionals are the utility players of society. We are flexible, adaptable players with the ability to contribute to the team in multiple ways.⚾️
A late-2019 Angus Reid study found that over the previous year almost a quarter of Canadians decided against filling a prescription or having one renewed due to medication unaffordability. Resultantly, many low-income outpatients who cannot afford to fill their prescriptions end up back in the hospital system as a result, therefore costing far more for provincial and federal government health ministries than if the medication had been covered.
It's very expensive and morally wrong when an elected government will promise the people much-needed universal albeit-generic-brand medication coverage only to have the pharmaceutical industry typically react with successful threats to abandon their Canada-based R&D, etcetera, if the government goes ahead with the ‘pharmacare’ plan. While such universal medication coverage would negatively affect the industry’s superfluously plentiful profits, the profits would nonetheless remain great, just not as great.
Clearly, a truly universal healthcare system needs to be supported by a pharmacare plan. Instead, we continue to be the world’s sole nation that has universal healthcare (theoretically, anyway) but no similar blanket coverage of prescribed medication, however necessary. Ergo, in order for the industry to continue raking in huge profits, Canadians and their health, as both individual consumers and a taxpaying collective, must lose out big time.
Canadians are often envied abroad for our “universal” healthcare system; yet, in a significant way, we still come second to big industry's big-profit interests. I fear that our system will eventually include actual crucial treatments that, at least in a timely thus beneficial manner, are universally in-accessible, except for those with the money to access privately at for-big-profit prices.
A late-2019 Angus Reid study found that over the previous year almost a quarter of Canadians decided against filling a prescription or having one renewed due to medication unaffordability. Resultantly, many low-income outpatients who cannot afford to fill their prescriptions end up back in the hospital system as a result, therefore costing far more for provincial and federal government health ministries than if the medication had been covered.
It's very expensive and morally wrong when an elected government will promise the people much-needed universal albeit-generic-brand medication coverage only to have the pharmaceutical industry typically react with successful threats to abandon their Canada-based R&D, etcetera, if the government goes ahead with the ‘pharmacare’ plan. While such universal medication coverage would negatively affect the industry’s superfluously plentiful profits, the profits would nonetheless remain great, just not as great.
Clearly, a truly universal healthcare system needs to be supported by a pharmacare plan. Instead, we continue to be the world’s sole nation that has universal healthcare (theoretically, anyway) but no similar blanket coverage of prescribed medication, however necessary. Ergo, in order for the industry to continue raking in huge profits, Canadians and their health, as both individual consumers and a taxpaying collective, must lose out big time.
Canadians are often envied abroad for our “universal” healthcare system; yet, in a significant way, we still come second to big industry's big-profit interests. I fear that our system will eventually include actual crucial treatments that, at least in a timely thus beneficial manner, are universally in-accessible, except for those with the money to access privately at for-big-profit prices.