GreenShield Canada has announced a new pilot program to address the gap that currently exists in Canada around access to prescription drug coverage.
The United Nations has declared that access to essential medicines is a fundamental human right, yet more than one million Canadians don't have prescription drug coverage.
GreenShield launched a first-of-its-kind program on Thursday, to provide essential medications to low income Canadians without public or private drug coverage.
More than 97 per cent of Canadians have some form of coverage for essential medicines, and the GreenShield Cares Essential Medicines program looks to be a solution to fill the gap for those without coverage.
The pilot program is now underway in Ontario, thanks to partnerships with the Niagara Falls Community Health Centre and the Windsor Essex Community Health Centre.
Ned Pojskic, Vice President of Pharmacy Benefits Management, says with their headquarters in Windsor and already established connections it made sense to have the community be one of the locations to kick start the program.
He says when thinking about the coverage situation in Canada, they wanted to find something that could solve the problem without impacting the private plans.
"That are there, that patients love, that employees love. Keep those plans in place, and fill in the gaps of those patients who don't have access to coverage. That immediately centered us on these one million Canadians, it's an estimate it's hard to know the exact number, that don't have any form of coverage and many of those individuals live in Ontario," he said.
Pojskic says there is a subset of Canadians who often have to choose between paying for their prescription medication or meeting their basic needs, leading to an overall reduced quality of life.
"We feel that this could be a really great starting point for what a federal or provincial government wants to do in terms of national pharmacare," he continued. "In some ways it feels like we've created the blueprint that the national pharmacare could follow in terms of filling in the gaps and preserving the strength of the public and private markets."
GreenShield has a long history of offering insurance, administering benefits, and paying claims.
For this program their digital pharmacy, The Health Depot, will dispense and deliver essential medicines at no cost.
Pojskic says they don't have any particular timeframe for the pilot, and in fact are hoping if it's successful that governments will recognize that and help them to scale it up moving forward.
"We are looking to target 1,000 individuals this year between the two locations as a starting point. The ambition is to certainly scale that up and grow, but to tackle the one million Canadians that don't have access we're going to need assistance. The goal is really to learn from these first two sites, understand how we can administer the program quickly and effectively, and that it's meeting the needs of those patients."
Anyone interested in learning more about the program and eligibility requirements can do so on the GreenShield website.
Back in 1957, Windsor pharmacist William Wilkinson saw his customers struggling to afford medications.
He was struck by one particular mother who chose to fill her child's prescription instead of her own because she couldn't afford to pay for both, and it was in response to this that Wilkinson founded GreenShield as a not-for-profit social enterprise.
Pojskic says ever since then they've been focused on finding a better way to deliver for people, and they're hopeful this new pilot will be the beginning of doing that when it comes to medication access.