Canadian Population Prescription Drug Reimbursement Model

The Fraser Tristat Canadian Population Prescription Drug Reimbursement Model has evolved through several generations over a 5 year period to answer increasingly demanding questions: 

• How many people have drug plan coverage? 
  
• What kind of coverage do they have? 
  
• How effective is this coverage in protecting families from financial hardship in the event of serious drug expenses? 
  
• What are the financial implications of various national Pharmacare proposals?

Recent findings from this Model were published as Drug Expense Coverage in the Canadian Population: Protection from Severe Drug Expenses and were quoted extensively in the Senate's Report on The Health of Canadians.

The model has also been used to assess the impact of 2003 changes in the British Columbia Pharmacare program.

The development of the Model was financed by the Canadian Life and Health Insurance Association for the purposes of public policy discussions. However, it can and has been used to investigate the market for employer sponsored drug programs.

The underlying methodology is extendible to the analysis of the market for pharmaceutical products or to the impact of plan design changes on plan sponsors with large employee populations.

A 6 page Technical Document describing the history and construction of the model is available here.