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Originally Posted by Fuzz
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Most of those measures have already been done, without most of the savings expected.
In 2014, the provincial governments spent $12.1B on medication. In 2013, 12.2B (both figures from Canadian institute for health information). Drug spending is approximately 13.5% of total health expenditure. To save 5% would be essentially cutting total drug spending almost in half. Maybe there's savings on the operations side, but not in drug costs.
The provincial governments are already doing single source generics (tendering, as described in the article above), and it hasn't provided anywhere near the savings expected. Drug expenditures dropped from 2013 to 2014, but almost all of that drop was because an unprecedented number of molecules became generic. Single source tendering also was responsible for a number of drug shortages.
Secondly, almost all growth in drug expenditures is biologics and novel cancer therapies. The number of prescriptions for drugs costing over $1500 per month has skyrocketed. I dispensed $20,000 in Harvoni to one patient for one month yesterday. There's no way to save via tendering here as there's no generics