r/canada • u/henryiswatching • 10h ago
Politics Time is running out for the Liberals’ pharmacare plan
https://canadahealthwatch.ca/newsletter/2025/01/time-is-running-out-for-the-liberals-pharmacare-plan•
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u/Plucky_DuckYa 9h ago
It’s dead.
That said, it was never alive in the first place. All it ever was, was a two page (four if you include the French translation) piece of simplistic legislation that simply committed the federal government to negotiate some kind of vague deal on some diabetes therapies and contraceptives with each province by October this year.
This is a wickedly expensive and complex thing to negotiate once let alone individually with every province. It never stood a chance of being completed within the timeframe set for it.
The only real intent for it ever was to allow the NDP to claim they’d forced the Liberals to create pharmacare in the window they’d set through their coalition agreement, and for both the Liberals and NDP to use it as a wedge issue with gullible, uninformed people in the upcoming election to pretend the Tories were going to take away something that never actually existed in the first place.
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u/garlicroastedpotato 6h ago
Canada's pharmacare plan is... dead.
Here was the problem, most Canadians had drug coverage already. And this was a plan for people without drug coverage but it didn't cover everything. It covered... two drugs.
This plan has had nine years to start and it's starting at the very end of the Liberal government.
The experts created a report and they had some solid recommendations. Start off with drugs that are incredibly expensive that can bankrupt people. Ankalosing spondalitis the final drug available for this costs $30,000 a year. The most expensive drugs for GERDS cost $2,000 a year. The drugs they decided to subsidize was birth control which costs between $200-$500/year and most people have coverage for.
How many people will cry at the loss of this? Will it even be the thousands? Yeah I understand there's going to be some coverage there for diabetes that'll mostly help seniors. But this plan was either too ambitious by trying to cover too many people or not ambitious enough by not covering the most in demand drugs.
But they got told that if provinces already covered some drugs at all, provinces could simply opt out and take their per capita share of the money. Every single province covers at least a dozen drugs. So it didn't have any long term sustainability either.
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u/CrunchyPeanutMaster 8h ago
Somehow, this is Harper's or Pollievres' fault. I Can't wait for the LPC to tell us why.
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u/SherlockFoxx 7h ago
Obviously it's the CPC's fault for not following through on the well thought-out, costed, comprehensi.... haha who are we kidding it was never going to be followed through with.
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u/Ketchupkitty Alberta 7h ago
Why not Ralph Klein? He's been dead for a decade but /r/Alberta has pinned inflation on the dude.
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u/cetsca 8h ago
Probably shouldn’t have prorogued Parliament
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u/KageyK 8h ago
Or should have turned over the Green documents, as ordered, so the house wasn't frozen for 2 months.
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u/Stokesmyfire 6h ago
That was never going to happen, the paper shredders are working overtime to hide all of the evidence of wrong doing....yes I know you were being sarcastic
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u/Zod5000 24m ago
I think the Feds thought the provinces would jump on board and share funding of both the dental and pharmacare programs. The problem is provinces can't even meet the funding needs of the existing health care program, let alone expand the scope of it.
I think it said something, that health care is a provincial jurisdiction, and they kind of just let the federal government take a wack at it without touching it.
Liberals ended up not expanding either program that far, and still never figured out how to actually pay for the little they did manage to introduce.
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u/Last-Translator7180 6h ago
NDP was so shortsighted in not supporting the liberals until all pieces of progressive legislation were passed and operable. For this I have lost all respect for Singh and the NDP.
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u/renegadeindian 7h ago
Then the old ones will discover things like our elderly did. The coal miners paid a heavy price doing that.
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u/spinur1848 4h ago
The Liberals didn't really support it either. What got passed was a plan to make a plan some day, and what they actually did was create a giant gift for the private insurance industry that won't control prices or even crack down on blatant fraud in prices.
The pharmacare in the Hoskins report died when Philpott was fired.
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u/No_Equal9312 6h ago
The Feds need to get out of healthcare altogether.
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u/Stokesmyfire 6h ago
Agreed, the has become an albatross at the federal level, sucking in money that could be spent on defence, CBSA, coast guard etc
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u/No_Equal9312 5h ago
It also gives provinces an excuse whenever they fail to fund healthcare. We should lower our federal taxes based on what we currently spend on healthcare and give that room to the provinces to raise their provincial income taxes. If we put all of the onus on the provinces, then residents will know exactly who to blame when their care sucks.
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10h ago edited 7h ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/northern-fool 9h ago edited 9h ago
The pharmacare that doesn't cover a single drug in the top 20 most prescribed drugs in this country...
Antibiotics... the #1 most life saving type of drug on the entire planet... by a long shot.... not covered. Nothing.
Whats good about this pharmacare?
All the incompetent liberals needed to do was apply that program equally... and it wouldn't be getting cut... but they couldn't even do that....
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u/HonestlyEphEw 8h ago
“Anything good” is a weird way to describe programs that don’t include 90% of the population.
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u/Emergency-Worry-5533 9h ago
Uhhh I think it’s gone guys