Friday, May 21, 2010

Medicare

The idea of extraordinary drug coverage seemed like a good one to me when the Romanow Report came out, but didn't really think about it as I haven't known anyone personally or professionally needing that kind of coverage as BC has pretty good pharmacare.

As with most things, once you know someone affected, this changes perspective. As in a family member needing a super expensive medication costing about $20,000-$24,000/year and the province they are in has a terrible pharmaceutical program.

How this can be when it makes so much money off of industry is beyond me-but I guess they don't have a debt do they? As if that matters when you are sick.

The arbitrariness of this kills me. For a related disease, drug is covered, though I noted when looking through the special coverage form that you pretty much have to be at the end of the line treatment wise before they will consider covering. This seems to be true of most of the drugs I saw on the document.

Yes, because multiple hospital stays are so much cheaper aren't they?

In relation to psychiatry, I saw that a drug we pretty much routinely give here, is not covered there, unless you get special authority, and that is after you have developed nasty side effects from older drugs.

This is not to say that I think newer drugs necessarily are the cat's meow-after all pharmaceutical companies like to make a lot of money and new drugs do this for them. But if we know that a drug is effective, why wouldn't we cover it (as in we-the government and taxpayers) rather than spend the money on repeated hospitalizations, ineffective medications, and the like?