New cancer drugs are very expensive. Most Canadians could never afford them without public coverage, even if they sold their homes and borrowed money from everyone they knew. Canada does not provide universal pharmacare (drug coverage). Provincial coverage decisions are complex – affected by political interests, changes in government, advocacy efforts, population size, and regional priorities.
These decisions don’t just impact how well people live with cancer; they can impact if they live at all. A Canadian research team looked at 15 oncology drugs being paid for by the provinces. They used a model to predict the number of life-years lost starting from when the cancer drug received Health Canada approval, to finally being paid for by any province.
The result was startling. Their research showed that drug access delays meant 39,067 overall life-years were lost. This means that despite having cancer, collectively people died 39,067 years earlier than expected. Importantly, they died even though a treatment was available – they just were not able to get it because of the way our system is set up.
Can these drug approval delays and access inequities be addressed and mitigated? That’s the objective of this paper – to shine a light on the system’s weak spots and explore the opportunities for improvement.