Yes, every province is responsible for its own drug benefits. We have no binding commitments between the federal and provincial governments around national standards, and so provinces run their own programs, which are very different.
Ontario, which is where that study was conducted, offers relatively comprehensive—in fact, “Pharmacare 2020”-like—coverage for persons age 65 and older. Under the age of 65 people in Ontario fall into the mix of private and public coverage that has been standard in Canada for so many years: voluntary private insurance for people who work in occupations that offer that as an extended health benefit, and then catastrophic coverage from the province for people who don't have private insurance.
That catastrophic plan which Danielle described has a 4% of household income deductible, which is thousands of dollars. It was an interesting study scientifically. In that Ontario study they compared people younger than 65 with diabetes with people just over 65 with diabetes and used the change in benefit structure that comes with that age of being entitled to public coverage as the mechanism of demonstrating the value or the increased access that comes with coverage. It is on that basis they were able to infer the number of diabetics who are skipping their medicines because of the costs when they are under 65 versus those over 65 who don't face those barriers. It is from that they were also able to infer the premature deaths.
I have similar work coming out later this summer from British Columbia looking at a similar study design based on our income-based drug plan, which has an accident of history. People born in 1939 or older got better coverage than people who were born after that date, and it's because in some sense they literally grandfathered the more comprehensive coverage that B.C. used to provide for seniors.