Reference Drug Program: Patient Issues
- Governments, private payers and policy makers cannot appropriately establish whether two different drugs are therapeutically equivalent, meaning they provide the same therapeutic benefits, as there is no evidence to support these decisions.
- There are no head to head clinical trials comparing two or more different drugs in the same class within the same population of patients.
- Indirect comparisons of several different drugs by looking at placebo-controlled studies do not provide appropriate information as each study may have different populations.
- Decisions about reference-based pricing are often made before there has been enough time to collect evidence that demonstrates the impact of reference-based pricing policies.
- Reference-based pricing limits patient access or choice to a wide range of effective medicines and health products.
- Patients in British Columbia are being denied best care and treatment options because BC PharmaCare restricts coverage in many cases to the least expensive or "best deal" medications and devices.
- Experts are not able to prescribe the medications they feel are most effective to treat their patients.
- Reference drug programs and reference-based pricing push cost to other parts of the healthcare system and generate negative health outcomes for patients.
- Evidence consistently shows that therapeutic substitution policies disrupt treatment, destabilize sick patients, and often cause people to stop treatment all together.
- The BC government's decision to expand its program for reference price and reference product is not about looking at cost as one of the factors that go into a decision as to which drugs within a class might be available; it is saying that it should be the primary decision.