This article originally appeared in the Financial Post.
By Nigel Rawson and John Adams, November 7, 2023
Last month the federal NDP convention in Hamilton voted unanimously to force the Liberals to introduce a single-payer universal pharmacare program or see the current “confidence-and-supply” deal canceled. Will universal government-run pharmacare benefit Canadians with rare disorders? We fear not.
Canadians with such disorders are already disadvantaged compared with sufferers in other countries. Fewer specialized drugs are launched in Canada than in the United States and Europe. Those that are get approval for marketing about a year, on average, after they do there.
That’s not because Health Canada takes longer to review new medicines. The process takes about the same time in the three places. Rather, delayed approval is likely due to manufacturers submitting later to Health Canada because federal, provincial and territorial hostility towards the industry has made our biopharmaceutical market less attractive.
Approval doesn’t mean government drug plans will pay for a drug, however. Further government-created barriers impact all Canadians, but particularly those with rare disorders who want access to novel drugs for their unmet or poorly met health needs. As a consequence, what gets listed in government drug plans varies widely, leading to a postal code lottery.
In a set of articles published over the summer by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, we discuss the several obstacles patients and their families face as they try to gain access to new or expensive innovative therapies. They include: the lack of federal incentives for developers to submit new medicines to Health Canada; health technology assessment that is neither accountable, independent nor transparent and makes recommendations about which drugs to cover in public drug plans to governments; and price negotiations between government drug plans and manufacturers.
Even when drug developers clear these government-created barriers, public drug plans are under no obligation to add the approved medicines to their benefit lists. Too often governments focus only on drug costs and ignore the broader benefits effective drugs can bring, not only to the health and well-being of patients and their families, but also to other parts of the health system, to the economy and to society at large. If a new drug reduces doctor or emergency visits or hospitalizations or helps a person get back to work, those benefits typically are ignored by our drug assessment system.
The federal government made matters worse over the past six years by planning to drastically reduce drug prices by regulatory order, not negotiation. This caused considerable uncertainty among developers, resulting in even fewer new drugs being submitted for marketing approval here than in the U.S. and EU.
Proponents plainly want a lowest-common-denominator government-run public plan that would crowd out private plans, which over two-thirds of Canadians currently rely on for drug access.
Despite the federal government committing $1.5 billion over three years to “increase access to, and affordability of, effective drugs for rare diseases to improve the health of patients across Canada,” its initiative is not comprehensive. So far, Canada has neither a government-endorsed national rare disorder strategy nor an Orphan Drug Act providing incentives to developers to launch orphan medicines in Canada. Most other developed countries have both.
Patients’ organizations have stepped in where governments have failed to act and proposed a Canadian strategy that would include incentives and funding to encourage developers to launch drugs in this country and cut through the barriers we have described to provide timely access to the many innovative treatments on the research horizon. For example, access to breakthrough drugs could be allowed as soon as Health Canada says they are safe and effective, even as other administrative boxes are checked and prices negotiated. Other countries use this approach.
Canadians afflicted with any of the 11,000 or so known rare disorders have significant unmet needs. Fewer than five per cent have any treatment beyond symptom relief or palliative care. The last thing these people need is for governments to ration innovative drugs even more than they already do or to force even deeper price cuts from drug developers in order to pay for universal pharmacare that covers only basic medicines.
Canadians with rare disorders almost certainly will be even worse off if the NDP’s parliamentary blackmail works.
Nigel Rawson is an affiliate scholar with the Canadian Health Policy Institute and a senior fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, as is John Adams, co-founder and CEO of Canadian PKU and Allied Disorders Inc.
