Health Committee on May 16th, 2016

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Ms. White, quickly.... One of the reasons it is thought that a national pharmacare would save money is that it would bring in bulk buying, have a national formulary, start dealing with cost-related non-adherence, provide exclusive access to some providers to negotiate lower prices, streamline the administration—cancelling thousands and thousands of private administration plans and substituting one streamlined public plan—and have better prescription practices. Are those some of the factors that might lead to lower costs?

[Julie White]

Those are some of the factors. I think part of it is also the capacity to bring pharmaceutical companies under control. They have huge profits. They are going to our doctors and talking to them about what drugs they should be carrying. They are providing conferences to doctors.

We need the kind of independent information to doctors that is provided in some of these fully public drug plans, as in Australia and the U.K., where information is independently given to doctors about what drugs they should be prescribing.

We have had some concerns here today. I will tell you one of my concerns. If we want to talk about statins, there are 38 million prescriptions a year for statins in Canada. That is more than one for every man, woman, and child in the country. It is out of control.

Statins are very controversial for people who have not had a heart event. We really have no way of controlling this. It is a situation of doctors prescribing statins after getting their information from pharmaceutical companies. There are a lot of savings to be made there, too.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Len Webber]

Very interesting. I am going to have to stop everyone here. Our session is over.

I would like to thank the panel sincerely for coming out and enlightening us all here.

I do have one quick question for Mr. Eisenschmid. You mentioned in your presentation that you represent 40,000 pharmacists in Canada. Are you seeing any significant increase in pharmacists and pharmacy retail outlets in the past six months or so?

The reason I ask that question is that I have been searching hard for a constituency campaign office in my riding of Calgary Confederation, and it has been very difficult, because when something does become available, a storefront property, I am always too late to get there because a pharmacist has taken the outlet. Three times this has happened to me.

I don't know.... Have you experienced this throughout the country, or is it just in my riding?

[Perry Eisenschmid]

No, the number hasn't changed much. We are between 9,500 and 9,800 storefronts. There is some shifting, some closing of smaller locations and consolidation into bigger enterprises, but there hasn't been a plethora of....

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Len Webber]

Some of these spaces are 850 square feet, which I can't imagine would be sufficient for a pharmacy. Then I start to think that perhaps it is in anticipation of our government's moving forward with medicinal marijuana, and they are hoping to dispense it. I don't know.

Thank you all very much. We appreciate it.

I am going to adjourn the meeting. We will see you all again at the next meeting. Thank you all.

The meeting is adjourned.