'He's in our hearts': Family and friends still seek answers one year after Nathan Wise’s disappearance
It’s been a year since Nathan Wise went missing and his family is no closer to finding out what happened to him.
Overall health-care costs could be reduced in Canada by providing free prescription drugs to patients, according to a new study.
Led by a researcher from the University of Toronto's medical school, the three-year study aimed to see how eliminating out-of-pocket medication fees would impact health-care system spending, particularly for patients who reported delaying or not taking prescription drugs due to costs.
"There are millions of Canadians who report not taking medications because of the costs," lead author and University of Toronto associate professor Dr. Nav Persaud told CTVNews.ca. "We were trying to measure the effects of providing people with free access to medicines, as would happen in a national pharmacare program."
The study tracked 786 adult patients at nine primary care sites in Ontario who were taking 128 different essential medicines that covered everything from diabetes to depression. In addition to prescriptions, total health-care cost calculations included emergency room trips, hospitalizations, home care, and visits with doctors and specialists.
Over three years, the study found that mean total health-care spending was reduced by $4,465 per patient, or $1,488 per person per year.
"If you multiply that out over the population, the savings would be much more than $1 billion annually in Canada, because there are estimates between two and four million people are not taking medications because of the cost," Persaud, who is also the Canada Research Chair in Health Justice and a staff physician and scientist at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, said.
Hospitalizations and intensive care unit stays represented the largest costs in the study.
"You could imagine patients who are better able to access their asthma or [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease] treatments being less likely to go to the emergency department or get admitted to the hospital," Persaud explained. "Then there could be more extreme cases, like someone with type one diabetes who's dependent on insulin: they might be admitted to the hospital ICU, that stay might cost $10,000, and then they get discharged with a box of insulin, but it only lasts a month or so, and then they land back in the hospital or the ICU."
The peer-reviewed study was published Friday by the Journal of the American Medical Association's Health Forum.
"These findings suggest that eliminating out-of-pocket medication costs for patients could reduce overall costs of health care," the study concluded. "This randomized clinical trial of an intervention has clear policy implications, and it provides information about total health care costs using routinely collected administrative data."
Canada is the only country in the world that has a universal health-care system without universal coverage for prescription drugs. Known as pharmacare, such systems pay for or subsidize prescription drug purchases. While Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party included universal pharmacare in their 2019 federal election platform, they have yet to fully act on the campaign promise.
Trudeau, who currently fronts a minority government, has been relying on NDP support to pass key legislation in what's known as a confidence-and-supply agreement. One of the NDP's conditions for that March 2022 agreement was the introduction of a legislative framework for pharmacare by the end of 2023. There was, however, no mention of pharmacare in the Liberals' 2023 federal budget, which was released in March.
"What we were able to force the government to do is what we could negotiate," federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh said at the time. "The Liberals don't seem to be as committed."
Persaud says while benefits to the health-care system are supported by a "mountain of evidence," pharmacare should also be viewed as "a human right."
"People who can't afford lifesaving treatments are going to bed tonight without these medications," Persaud said. "I think the main reason is lobbying by the pharmaceutical industry and the private insurance industry. For them, every dollar that pharmacare saves is a dollar less in revenue."
It’s been a year since Nathan Wise went missing and his family is no closer to finding out what happened to him.
Dozens of Ontarians are expressing frustration in the province’s health-care system after their family doctors either dropped them as patients or threatened to after they sought urgent care elsewhere.
An Ottawa pizzeria is being recognized as one of the top 20 deep-dish pizzas in the world.
Amazon's paid subscription service provides free delivery for online shopping across Canada except for remote locations, the company said in an email. While customers in Iqaluit qualify for the offer, all other communities in Nunavut are excluded.
The fire burning near Fort McMurray grew from 25 hectares to 5,500 hectares over the weekend.
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin began a Cabinet shakeup on Sunday, proposing the replacement of Sergei Shoigu as defence minister as he begins his fifth term in office.
Police are searching for a male suspect after a man was “slashed in neck” on Sunday morning in downtown Toronto and died.
There were some scary moments for several people on a northern Ontario highway caught on video Thursday after a chain reaction following a truck fire.
Health Canada announced various product recalls this week, including electric adapters, armchairs, cannabis edibles and vehicle components.
English, history, entertainment, math and geography: high school trivia teams could be quizzed on any of it when they compete at the Reach for the Top Nationals in Ottawa in June.
An Ottawa pizzeria is being recognized as one of the top 20 deep-dish pizzas in the world.
A family of fifth generation farmers from Ituna, Sask. are trying to find answers after discovering several strange objects lying on their land.
A Listowel, Ont. man, drafted by the Hamilton Tigercats last week, is also getting looks from the NFL, despite only playing 27 games of football in his life.
The threat of zebra mussels has prompted the federal government to temporarily ban watercraft from a Manitoba lake popular with tourists.
A small Ajax dessert shop that recently received a glowing review from celebrity food critic Keith Lee is being forced to move after a zoning complaint was made following the social media influencer’s visit last month.
The Canada Science and Technology Museum is inviting visitors to explore their poop. A new exhibition opens at the Ottawa museum on Friday called, 'Oh Crap! Rethinking human waste.'
The Regina Police Service says it is the first in Saskatchewan and possibly Canada to implement new technology in its detention facility that will offer real-time monitoring of detainees’ vital health metrics.
Just as she had feared, a restaurant owner from eastern Quebec who visited Montreal had her SUV stolen, but says it was all thanks to the kindness of strangers on the internet — not the police — that she got it back.