Evaluating the safety of prescription drugs prior to approval and monitoring their safety once they have been marketed should be a major priority in any drug regulatory system.
Over the past two decades, about 3-to-4% of the drugs approved by the Therapeutic Products Directorate (TPD), the arm of Health Canada charged with approving new prescription drugs, have subsequently had to be withdrawn from the market due to safety reasons.
Health, health care system, pharmacare
There’s deformed pickerel in Lake Athabasca... Pushed-in faces, bulging eyes, humped back, crooked tails... never used to see that. Great big lumps on them... you poke that, it sprays water... A friend caught a jackfish recently with two lower jaws... He had seen deformed jackfish before, but never one with two jaws. -- Ray Ladouceur, Elder of Fort Chipewyan, Alberta.
Does anyone remember that the Conservative party, just four years ago, promised to implement a national drug plan? During the 2004 election, with health care a top priority for Canadians, the Conservatives made a commitment of $2.8 billion for a federal program to cover drug costs for individuals who had to pay more than $5,000 a year for their prescription drugs. It was part of a promise to spend a total of $13 billion of new federal money over five years on health care.
OTTAWA—Today the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) released The Harper Record, the most comprehensive analysis of the Conservative minority government’s record to date.
“Scheduled for broad release in early October, we are releasing the electronic version of this book today, to help Canadians make informed choices about the future of their country,” says CCPA Executive Director Bruce Campbell.
This book is one in a series of CCPA publications that have examined the records of Canadian federal governments during the duration of their tenure.
The pharmaceutical industry is dominated by just 10 to 20 giant companies--roughly half European and half American--although they are really global in their reach. They all do business in much the same way, and often act more like an oligopoly than as competitors. And make no mistake: Their primary goal is to maximize profits. To keep investors happy, they need to top their performance every quarter, no matter how good it was last quarter. In health care, this imperative has perverse consequences.
Imagine looking in a mirror and not seeing the nose on your face. There it is, right in front of your eyes but somehow you just don’t see it. Sound impossible? Clearly, for some people it’s not because when it comes to health care, our provincial government is expert at ignoring the obvious. Despite a government-initiated, $10 million, year-long “conversation” that saw citizens overwhelmingly call for improvements to publicly-funded health care, the B.C. health ministry shows no signs of listening.
In looking forward, we need to make health care the objective rather than the problem. And instead of seeing expenditures on health care as the primary issue, we should look at the contributions health care makes, not only to the overall economy and corporations, but also to employment and communities. To do so in ways that are equitable and effective, and thus efficient, we need to recognize that gender matters and understand the ways gender matters in health and care.
So-called “studies” by right-wing think-tanks have long provided “evidence” for the corporate media to bash “big government” and extol the virtues of the private corporations which, coincidentally, fund these think-tanks.
The mainstream media treat these studies like gospel, and why not? The findings are “common sense.”
Take, for example, a recent study on health care by the Frontier Centre of Winnipeg. It introduces a few new twists on a tired and discredited theme: private is better than public.