The Ontario legislature passed Bill 16, Creating the Foundation for Jobs and Growth Act, 2010 , on Tuesday, banning professional allowances (generic rebates) to pharmacies. In the meantime, the McGuinty government is treading carefully with regard to further changes.
According to Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care press secretary Ivan Langrish, the government is extending its own deadline in order to fully explore the public submissions it has received.
“We want to take some time to get it right,” he says. “There are a number of very detailed submissions that we want to take time to go through. We take the public submission process very seriously. We are in a careful consideration phase right now.”
Langrish won’t reveal which submissions were being considered, but he is adamant that the two main issues of professional allowances and a 50% cut in the price of generic drugs are non-negotiable.
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As a result, the primary benefit for benefit plan sponsors will be a reduced drug spend.
“As a jurisdiction, Ontario pays up to 7 times more than other regions for generics,” says Langrish. “The primary driver for that cost is professional allowances. Eliminating them enables us to reduce the costs by half for public and private plans as well as cash-paying customers.”
While public sector drug plans will benefit from locked in dispensing fees at pharmacies, it is possible that private plans will see such fees increase as a result of the reforms.
“On the public side we’ve taken steps to mitigate that, but of course we can’t control fees on the private side,” says Langrish.
With files from the .
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