CCSN is among twenty-two national patient organizations that have expressed their support for the recent announcement regarding the amendments to the regulations governing the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board (PMPRB).
On April 14, the Honourable Jean-Yves Duclos, federal Minister of Health, announced that the amendments will come-into-force on July 1, 2022, with a significant change: two parts of the proposed amendments have been dropped – the economic pricing factors and the expanded reporting requirements. That leaves the updated basket of comparator countries as the main part of the amendments that will still be applied.
The letter to Minister Duclos signed by CCSN and twenty-one other organizations endorses the updated basket of comparator countries as a straightforward change that will improve Canadians’ access to medicines.
The PMPRB is a federal organization whose job is to monitor the prices of patented drugs and prevent them from becoming excessive. The federal government originally proposed the amendments in 2019; they will be the first significant changes to the regulations controlling patented medicines in over 30 years.
CCSN and its partner organizations have paid close attention to the amendments since they were proposed; see the section Protect Our Access for more on this topic.
Although the details of drug pricing regulations can be arcane and technical, they have the potential to make all the difference for the many Canadians whose lives depend on access to patented drugs. CCSN supports the federal government in this decision and in other efforts – such as the development of a national strategy for drugs for rare diseases – that serve to protect our access to life-saving drugs.