HANNAFORD: Trudeau's drug plan too bitter a pill for Alberta to swallow

There may be a case for helping Albertans with the cost of prescription drugs. There is no case for partnering with the Trudeau Liberals to do it.Mercifully, Premier Smith appears to understand the risks that would involve; an AHS spokesman commented over the weekend that if anything came of the Liberal proposal, Alberta would opt out.This is not the tragedy that Alberta’s left is saying it is. (The twitter machine is already spun up.)Three points.First, let’s be clear about what this is really about.The federal government’s interest in pharmacare has nothing to do with any urgent desire the Trudeau Liberals feel to relieve the distress of impoverished Canadians unable to afford pharmaceuticals. They are in their ninth year of office: If it was, they would have acted upon it before now. It is instead the symbolic price demanded by NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh of the prime minister, for the confidence and supply agreement through which his support of Mr. Trudeau’s government continues. (Legislation is to be tabled before the end of March, an extension of the original December deadline.) For good or ill, this is an NDP priority, not a Liberal one.Second, speaking of good or ill, what could be wrong with such a scheme? Many people who are not fortunate enough to be covered by employer benefit packages, do find the cost of medications burdensome. Do they not deserve government help?The answer is that government is not necessarily the answer. There are alternatives.The Blue Cross organization, for example, operates across Canada and provides a range of plans and benefits. Anybody can qualify for $1,500 annually for each of prescription drugs and dental coverage, with extended health benefits to $5,000. Persons under 64 can purchase a plan that provides up to $10,000/year for prescription drugs and $2,000/year for dental. And so on.People with employer plans will find these levels of benefit familiar. There is a cost to Blue Cross, of course but so there is also to participation in an employer-supported fund.Advocates point out, of course, that the government plan would be ‘free.’In this context however, ‘free’ is nothing of the sort. Nothing provided through government is free. Taxpayers pay for everything and governments by their nature tend to be inefficient suppliers: Canadians do not receive a dollar in benefits for every dollar paid in taxes.Likewise, nobody even knows what they’re wanting the Government of Alberta to say ‘yes’ to. What this putative leftie night-fantasy might cover and to what level, has yet to be decided. All we know is that the NDP rejected the first draft of the legislation as providing “insufficient” benefit. So it’s unlikely to mean every pill you ever wanted to pop will be available in unlimited supply and at no cost. There will be limits. Just as well: As we have learned from the public’s use of the health-care system, making something ‘free’ also invites costly abuses. A ‘free’ prescription drug regime is vulnerable to the same thing and has the potential to become yet another money pit in which finite resources are challenged by unrestrained, if not infinite, demand. And that runaway expense would begin when the millions of Canadians who presently have benefit plans with which they are perfectly content, lose them and become a charge to the state instead of their employers.Third, we have seen this little shell game before. When the federal government wanted the provinces to join them in promoting universal health-care, they offered provincial governments 50 cents on the dollar. Years later in 1996, when Ottawa had its own books to balance, it walked away from that and handed the problem to the provinces — which of course, then had no option but to maintain the-then spending levels, at the expense of everything else they did.Smith is well aware of that ancient history. Instructing Health Minister Arianna LaGrange to ‘opt out’ would have taken her no time at all to decide.None of this means low-income people requiring expensive medications don’t have a problem. It is however one to which the Alberta Health Services already responds in part at least through its Specialized High Cost Drug Program.Yes, some will certainly say that it doesn't cover everybody who deserves help.However, to the degree that the Government of Alberta needs to expand eligibility to help those very difficult cases that still fall between the cracks, the route forward must surely be found in some kind of discretionary grant. A voucher system, perhaps? Putting a little more financial force behind Alberta Blue Cross?In any case something that allows those Albertans in the most difficult circumstances to set their own priorities.What Albertans don't need — nor indeed any Canadian — is to become victims of an arbitrary medications regime designed not to address their needs, but purely to get the prime minister out of a hole.

HANNAFORD: Trudeau's drug plan too bitter a pill for Alberta to swallow

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