The money spent on pharmaceutical treatment in Ontario more than pays off in savings for the health system and improved productivity for the economy, according to a report.
The Conference Board of Canada report, Reducing the Health Care and Societal Costs of Disease: The Role of Pharmaceuticals, quantifies how pharmaceutical treatment affects both direct healthcare costs and society more broadly.
“Public healthcare in Canada is under pressure to rein in rising costs, and drugs have been identified as a target in reducing costs,” says Louis Thériault, director, health economics, for the board’s Canadian Alliance for Sustainable Health Care.
“But our empirical research suggests that when it comes to certain conditions, pharmaceutical treatments offer benefits in reducing health-related complications and lowering the incidence of disease.”
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This analysis examines pharmaceutical treatments involving six drug classes: angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors (for high blood pressure and hypertension), statins (for high cholesterol), biguanides (for diabetes), biological response modifiers (for rheumatoid arthritis), inhaled steroids (for asthma), and prescription smoking cessation aids.
In Ontario, public, private and out-of-pocket expenses for these six drug classes totalled $1.22 billion last year.
The analysis calculated the impact of these treatments on overall healthcare costs (including drugs, physicians and hospitals) and on other costs to society (including short and long-term disability, early mortality and lost productivity specifically due to disease).
The total economic benefit attributed to treatment from these six classes of drugs was nearly $2.44 billion in 2012.
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Between 2007 and 2012, the analysis found both the absolute and relative health and societal benefits increased vis-à-vis costs in Ontario.
Among the six classes of drugs, pharmaceuticals used to treat diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and asthma produced benefits that outweighed their costs.
However, during this period, benefits did not fully offset the costs in the classes of drugs covering rheumatoid arthritis treatment and prescription smoking cessation.
For rheumatoid arthritis patients, biological response modifiers represent a new and effective class of drug, but treatment costs remain very high. For prescription smoking cessation aids, the benefits take longer to materialize than many other classes of drugs, according to the analysis.
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