Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Province to gut program that avoided costly, dangerous drug spending

One of B.C.'s great health care successes has been its management of spending on prescription drugs. A major factor has been the Therapeutics Initiative at UBC, which assesses the benefits and risks of new drugs, providing the information needed to determine whether they're worth adding to the list covered by Pharmacare.
It's a success story that has attracted praise from around the world and saved the public hundreds of millions of dollars. Now the government, pushed by Big Pharma, wants to gut the Initiative.
A Victoria doctor in family practice offers a view from the frontlines here.

2 comments:

RossK said...

Mr. Willcocks,

I, for one, would be interested in your opinion on how this 'decision' was deflector-spun out of bounds such that it has remained pretty much a non-story despite the fact that it will have a real and lasting impact on all British Columbians.


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Anonymous said...

It's particularly remarkable that the Campbellites found it so urgent to establish "sustainability" as an element of health care policy, and now are setting policy that directly and dramatically contradicts that "principle". Sustainability is obviously in the eye of the beholder.