The right course of treatment

Jeffrey Simpson is somewhat overeager to take sides in the patented-vs-generic drug tug-of-war. But that aside, it's tough to argue with his point that a comprehensive national formulary could go a long way toward reining in the fastest-growing portion of Canadian health expenses:

One thing Ontario and all provinces should do is create a national drug formulary, a change recommended in the 2002 Romanow report on health care in Canada. Each province maintains its own formulary, and negotiates with drug suppliers to meet its needs. This is crazy, since the provinces together, representing 33-million people, would likely negotiate better prices than any individual province could.

Of course, provinces will disagree at the margin about which drugs should be included in their formularies, but they could surely agree on 90-95 per cent of the drugs common to all formularies. Drug companies don’t like this prospect, which is a good reason for doing it.