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He said it was “shocking” that the polling found one in 10 Canadians with chronic conditions have ended up in the emergency room due to worsening health because they were unable to afford a prescription.
I imagine this costs way more than what would have cost not to skip the prescriptions (through pharmacare) That's almost 50% of the Canadians skipping prescriptions.
I don't know why healthcare is only healthcare when it's an emergency, and everything else is a luxury. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, as they say.
There's also a lot of issues which won't land you in the hospital but will severely decrease your quality of life or limit your ability to work, which is a needless burden on people.
Emergency healthcare is there ONLY to make sure you get back to work and paying taxes rather than dying. Non-emergency healthcare consumes taxes while you pay the same amount.
I work two jobs and one of them pays well. I say this only to say that even on my relaxed budget the cost of some of the meds the doc's tried to give me - basically on speculation - were a "how about no".
And I think I'm up there for pay. Like, how the hell is your middle or low income even going to make that choice? Is it to tick the "spoke to patient who declined meds" check-box?
So yeah, I think the 1 in 4 is low.
Everyone in BC should be signing up for Fair PharmaCare; it was hugely helpful for me when I was unemployed for a year after finishing my master's degree, but there are still benefits even if you are employed (they cap how much you should be paying for drugs during the year based on your income).
I earn a good income today (and today just accepted a job offer for an even better income!) and I'm proud to pay back into a program that helped me with expenses when I was down - I hope the NDP succeed and we get a similar program on a federal level.
That's honestly way higher than I expected. I am personally very fortunate to not require any ongoing medication so I've sort of dodged needing to pay close attention to this. I support universal pharmacare on principle, but even more so with this news.