Canadian patients bound for Bangor Travelers to visit drugstores, doctors

BANGOR – Usually people drive north across the Canadian border to buy cheaper prescription drugs, but this week they’ll do just the opposite.

On Thursday a bus with about 15 people will leave St. John, New Brunswick, headed for drugstores and doctors’ offices in Bangor.

The patients will be bound for appointments with doctors for tests or procedures that they say require months of waiting in Canada. Others will be looking for drugs unavailable in Canada.

The trip is organized by Consumer Advocare Network in Toronto, which has been pushing for reform of Canada’s single-payer health care plan and expansion of national drug coverage.

Canada’s plan, with government-provided health care for all, is touted by some in the United States as an example of a program that worked.

But Durhane Wong-Rieger, who chairs the Consumer Advocare Network, said the Canadian program is not as effective as it would appear.

“We’ve got many patients who can’t get access to health care,” she said. “We’ve got a great system, but the problem is that because it’s a universal system that has been underfunded, it’s difficult for people to get the care they need.”

Wong-Rieger said that under Canada’s health care program, provinces cover the cost of drugs primarily for those who are disabled, senior citizens or the unemployed – and the drugs covered under that program are limited and vary from province to province.

People can purchase private drug insurance, but those policies also have limits, sometimes modeled on the provincial drug lists.

Drugs also take longer to approve in Canada – about twice as long as in the United States, studies found – and because Canada puts caps on drug prices, some drug manufacturers don’t find it profitable to sell their products north of the border, Wong-Rieger said.

In other cases, patients are required to take older, often less effective drugs, first. Only when those drugs are shown to be ineffective can they move on to the new, more expensive medications, she said.