MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W3125292784

Rethinking Pharmacare in Canada

2013· article· en· W3125292784 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueC.D. Howe Institute Commentary · 2013
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEconomics, Econometrics and Finance
TopicHealthcare Policy and Management
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsMedical prescriptionSubsidyBusinessHealth carePurchasing powerPurchasingHealthcare systemPopulationPublic economicsFinanceEconomic growthMedicineMarketingEnvironmental healthPolitical scienceEconomicsNursing
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

All developed countries with universal healthcare systems provide universal coverage for prescription drugs – except Canada. Instead, Canadian provinces allocate limited public subsidies for prescriptions drugs, leaving the majority of costs to be financed out-of-pocket and through private insurance. We review three of the main approaches to provincial pharmacare policy – exemplified by British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec – and compare them with policies in other countries. We find that Canadian models for prescription drug financing have major shortcomings. All provincial systems involve considerable patient charges and multiple payers that are not responsible for financing patients’ medical and hospital care. The costs borne by patients are known to reduce the use of medicines that might otherwise improve patient health and reduce costs elsewhere in the healthcare system. And the involvement of multiple payers adds administrative costs, diminishes purchasing power and creates funding silos that limit the potential for healthcare managers and providers to consider the full benefits and opportunity costs of prescription drugs as an input into the broader healthcare system. The performance of countries with comparable healthcare systems shows that integrating pharmaceuticals into the healthcare system by covering medically necessary prescription drugs at little or no cost to patients would result in improved performance on all key pharmacare policy goals. Countries with such coverage achieve better access to medicines, and greater financial protection for the ill, at significantly lower total cost than any Canadian province achieves. In this Commentary, we suggest that provinces expand public pharmacare programs to all segments of the population with a specific focus on promoting access to medicines of proven value-for-money in our healthcare system. Though the immediate effect of this would be an increase in government spending, this would, over time, be more than offset by savings to patients, employers and individuals who purchase stand-alone private drug coverage.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.412
Threshold uncertainty score0.723

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.070
GPT teacher head0.253
Teacher spread0.183 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it