National Pharmacare Initiative - Nov 22, 2018 Toronto

[A Former User]

I look forward to meeting you at the Summit. I am the CCO (cancer Care Ontario)PFA for OSSCD (Ontario Steering Committee for (approval of) Cancer Drugs). First time attending.

kathy Smith

[A Former User]

Hi Kathy

I am also attending the summit. I am the past chair of the Canadian Breast Cancer Network. should be very interesting.

[A Former User]

Hi Diana Looking forward to meeting you at the Biosimilars Summit next Friday, Nov. 16th

[A Former User]

Hi Kathy

Sorry, I mixed up my summits. I won't be there, but Jenn Gordon from CBCN will be.

[A Former User]

I guess you are one of the lucky ones going to the SPOR Summit. Maybe next year I’ll get there. I will look for Jenn Gordon at the Biosimilars. Thanks Diana.

[A Former User]

Interesting...they are encouraging Patients, Caregiver to attend and they will waive the registration fee. I left two messages for Ronson and no response!!

[A Former User]

Hope you get to attend Samira. I would love to, but, I am too far away. Maybe they will post a summary. Pharmacare is such a big issue.

[A Former User]

Did not get an opportunity to attend Kathy! Hopefully next time. Totally agree this is a big issue

[A Former User]

Hi All,

I got to attend the National Pharmacare Conference on Thurs Nov 22/18 in downtown Toronto and wanted to post a summary as requested by some of the PAN folks. The conference was hosted by the health section of the Conference Board of Canada who were deemed to be a neutral body. It was an enjoyable and enlightening day.

Marianne Fotia, who is one of the conference organizers, gave me permission to share the Agenda pdf with the PAN group. It includes the list of panelists. I am working to post it, but the lady who initiates the PAN file postings is unavailable right now. I'll do another PAN posting once the Agenda is loaded: In the meanwhile, if you want a copy, email me at nroper@alumni.uwaterloo.ca.

The conference folks gave us a very informative pre-read document that explained the various definitions of "Universal Pharmacare" and talked about the various ways it could be implemented. Marianne gave me permission to share this with PAN via the following link. They asked that we NOT email the document, presumably to make sure that folks go to the source to get the most up-to-date version of the document. Here's the url:

https://www.conferenceboard.ca/e-library/abstract.aspx?did=9970

Marianne asked that I not share the attendee list for privacy reasons, but to give you an idea, there were 100 attendees and they were from the following groups:

• - Patient Groups / Advisors for various diseases and LHINs

• - Various Government groups - eg Health Canada, CIHI, Finance Canada, Cdn Blood Services

• - Various Medical Associations - eg CMA, College of Physicians of Canada, Cdn Nurses Assoc, Cdn Pharmacists Assoc, Cdn Dental Assoc

• - Pharmaceutical Companies - lots of them

• - Supplemental Healthcare Companies - only a handful of them - which surprised me

There were reps from New Brunswick, PEI, Quebec, UBC and a pharma speaker from the USA (on American Thanksgiving day yet!)

As a summary, there were a series of speakers and panel discussions, then a workshop where we had to look at the situation from the viewpoint of each of the players (patients, doctors, pharma, supplemental health, government finance folks, etc), and then a mock debate about 4 of the implementation options. There was networking time over breakfast, lunch and breaks.

........................

And now my personal perspective, which may be flawed since I'm a newbie to this, but for what it's worth:

I arrived with a positive outlook on the National Pharmacare plan, since I understand that it's silly for us to provide universal medical care only to have people unable to afford the prescriptions their doctors suggest to make them healthy. However, once I learned about all the different interpretations / definitions / options for "Universal" and the impact on so many groups, I came away with a personal opinion that we should leave the existing system intact and just do some reforms to:

• - Help people without coverage to get their prescriptions

• - Make the coverage uniform across the country by INCREASING the coverage in provinces that are currently behind.

• - Include an option for people with rare illnesses / very expensive drugs to get them, assuming the drugs are deemed effective via the scientists (similar to Trillium, Exceptional Access Program, I believe)

• - Include a co-pay tiered to income level so people don't abuse the system

Some of my key concerns were:

• - The formulary - one of the options reduces the formulary to a list of 125 "Essential Medicines" put together by an international body somewhere. For comparison purposes, I think they said that the supplemental healthcare companies have a formulary with 14,000 (??) medications on it. So that means that some people could LOSE coverage for medications that work for them or be forced to generics if we ditch the supplemental plans and move everyone to one of the more restrictive / economical "universal" formularies.

• - Drug Innovation - if the government trims the drug list to just a few drugs in each class, and only the "essential" ones at that, and then forces the pharmas to reduce their prices, how will the pharmaceutical companies fund new drug discovery projects?

• - How will the cost of unemployment benefits for all the people put out of work by the NPI compare to the cost of sticking with the current full-service plan?

Note that I'm definitely NOT an expert on this topic, so some of my opinions above may be flawed, but at least it may give you some food for thought.

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Please feel free to jump in and share any information / opinions you have on these topics so we can all learn together.

.....N

[A Former User]

Thanks Nancy

That clears up some areas I had doubts about - the main one being the shrunken formulary.

Annette