Pharmacare won't be free for all Canadians, Bill Morneau says


READ MORE

Federal Finance Minister Bill Morneau says a new national pharmacare program will be “fiscally responsible” and designed to fill in gaps, not provide prescription drugs for Canadians already covered by existing plans.


Speaking at the Economic Club of Canada in Ottawa to kick off a post-budget sales job, Morneau said many Canadians are without coverage, including people who are self-employed. Some parts of the system are working well, but others are not, he said.


“We need a strategy to deal with the fact not everyone has access, and we need to do it in a way that’s responsible, that deals with the gaps, but doesn’t throw out the system that we currently have,” he said.


 Eric Hoskins, Ontario’s former Liberal health minister, will chair a council that will consult with stakeholders and make recommendations to government on how to proceed with a national plan.


Morneau said the committee will need time to carefully study the issue because the workforce and cost of pharmaceuticals have changed dramatically in the last two decades. 


Morneau says free pharmacare won’t be for everyone1:30


Ontario adopted a pharmacare plan this year that offers free medication to babies, children and youth aged 24 and under who have OHIP coverage.


Called OHIP+, the program is expected to cost about $450 million a year and affect about four million people provincewide. It expands a program already providing coverage for Ontario’s seniors and those on Ontario Works that offers financial and employment help to residents of the province.


No cost estimate for a national pharmacare program was provided in the budget, prompting NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh to declare the strategy a “fantasy.”


An association representing pharmacists said in a news release that access to critical drugs is a serious problem.


“I see firsthand the difficulties my patients face when they cannot afford the medications they need to be healthy. This is unacceptable, and we are encouraged that the federal government will be looking at options for how to best serve these patients,” said Alistair Bursey, chair of the Canadian Pharmacists Association.


The groups said it is also important for medication to be properly dispensed, and that pharmacists often see patients who are on too many medications, or who aren’t taking them as directed.



Article source: http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/russian-plane-crash-1.4530638?cmp=rss


Best Wordpress Plugin development company in India     Best Web development company in India

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Canadian expected to be aboard Russia's 1st manned space mission since rocket failure

READ MORE The first manned mission to the International Space Station since a Russian rocket failed to launch successfully earlier this month may take off on Dec. 3, space agency Roscosmos said on Wednesday. And the crew is expected to include Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques, Agence France-Press reported. A Russian cosmonaut and U.S. astronaut were forced to abort their mission on Oct. 11 and perform an emergency landing after a launch accident that Roscomos said was caused by a faulty sensor. The accident was the first serious launch problem experienced by a manned Soyuz space mission since 1983, when a crew narrowly escaped before a launch pad explosion. Sergei Krikalyov, a senior Roscosmos official, was quoted by state news agency Tass as saying the next manned launch had been planned for mid-December, but that Russia was trying to bring the date forward so that the ISS is not briefly left without a crew. “The industry is making significant efforts to move the launch t...
Read more

Getting the dope on pot stocks is becoming easier as media groups invest in content: Don Pittis

Image
READ MORE “What’s the buzz? Tell me what’s happening,” goes the ’70s rock anthem. Part of the catchiness of the lyric — from the rock musical Jesus Christ Superstar  — was that in that era the term “buzz” had developed a second spicy meaning. It described the high that people got from smoking cannabis. In the 1970s, the magazine High Times was a brand new title keeping an eye on the illegal but growing business of marijuana pricing and sales. It ran centrefolds of glistening pot plants and of an apartment filled to the windows with what the magazine insisted was an entire ton of cannabis. Now some of Canada’s most staid media voices are looking for ways to go toe to toe with High Times and its U.S. competitors, hoping to profit from Canada’s global head start in legal recreational cannabis. But when it comes to making a killing from spreading the buzz on the cannabis biz, to q...
Read more

Toronto man denies conspiring with Marvel CEO in alleged hate mail scheme

Image
READ MORE A Toronto man accused of conspiring with the head of Marvel Entertainment in a bizarre hate mail campaign against his wealthy former employer has denied any role in the alleged scheme. David Smith, along with Marvel CEO Isaac (Ike) Perlmutter, is the target of a slander lawsuit launched earlier this year by Canadian businessman Harold Peerenboom. Now Smith — a former employee of Peerenboom’s Toronto-based executive search firm, Mandrake Management — has filed a motion to dismiss the U.S. civil suit. It’s the latest development in the years-long legal battle between Peerenboom and Perlmutter, a notoriously reclusive American billionaire and personal friend of U.S. President Donald Trump. The hate mail campaign, which ran   between 2012 to 2015, saw anonymous letters falsely accusing Peerenboom of being a child molester, murderer and anti-Semite...
Read more