NDP leader Jagmeet Singh warns the PM to keep his promises on health-care reform, or else

Editor:

Currently the pharmaceutical industry profits from the continual sedation and/or concealment of ACE-trauma’s symptoms via tranquilizers and/or antidepressants. And I wouldn’t be surprised if industry representatives had a significant-enough say in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual’s original composition and continue to influence its revisions/updates.

From my understanding, only a small percentage of physicians are integrating ACE-trauma science into the diagnoses and (usually chemical) treatments of their patients.

Also, I don’t believe it’s just coincidental that the only two health professions’ appointments for which Canadians are fully covered by the public plan are the two readily pharmaceutical-prescribing psychiatry and general practitioner health professions? Such non-Big-Pharma-benefiting health specialists as counsellors, therapists and naturopaths (etcetera) are not covered a red cent.

Meantime, whenever a Canadian federal government promises the populace universal generic-brand medication coverage, indeed itself a rare commitment here, the pharmaceutical industry reacts with ultimately successful threats of abandoning their Canada-based R&D (etcetera) if the government goes ahead with its ‘pharmacare’ plan. Why? Such a plan would affect the industry’s huge profits.

People’s health apparently comes second to maximizing profits, in particular those amassed by an increasingly greedy pharmaceutical industry. Resultantly, we continue to be the world’s sole nation that has universal healthcare but no similar coverage of prescribed medication, however necessary.

A late-2019 Angus Reid study found that about 90 percent of Canadians — including three quarters of Conservative Party supporters specifically — support a national ‘pharmacare’ plan. Another 77 percent believed this should be a high-priority matter for the federal government. The study also found that, over the previous year, due to medication unaffordability, almost a quarter of Canadians decided against filling a prescription or having one renewed.

Not only is medication less affordable, but other research has revealed that many low-income outpatients who cannot afford to fill their prescriptions end up back in the hospital system as a result, therefore costing far more for provincial and federal government health ministries than if the medication had been covered. Ergo, in order for the industry to continue raking in huge profits, Canadians and their health, as both individual consumers and a taxpaying collective, must lose out big time.

Frank Sterle Jr.

White Ro ck, B.C.

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