For Immediate Release: October 31, 2002

New Pacific Research Institute study explains how government controlled health-care system in America would increase prescription costs, weaken quality care, and threaten new treatments

San Francisco, CA — While American politicians tout Canadian health care and lead bus tours across the border, Canadians themselves increasingly board buses for the United States to seek treatment and purchase prescription drugs not available under their own government plan. This is according to Lessons from the North: Bus Travelers Bring the Reality of Rationed Health Care and Price-Controlled Drugs over the Border, a briefing released today by the Pacific Research Institute (PRI).

“For years, Americans have been regaled by stories of busloads of seniors heading to Canada to buy cut-rate prescriptions,” said author Sally C. Pipes, president of PRI and a Canadian. “Canadians have headed to the United States for nearly as many years as the Canadian government has controlled medical care,” Pipes said.

Lessons from the North shows how failures in Canada's government-controlled system delay procedures such as echocardiograms, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and positron emission tomography (PET).

“A Canadian can purchase a CAT scan for his or her pet, but they can’t purchase a PET scan for themselves,” said Pipes, who shows how lengthy delays for surgery in Canada leave patients desperate and often in pain.

Lessons from the North charts how waiting times from general practitioner to treatment have increased by seven weeks, from 9.3 weeks in 1993 to 16.2 weeks in 2000-01. “One Ottawa hospital has even rationed the delivery of babies,” said Pipes.

The briefing also outlines how Canadian-style price controls on prescription drugs, though popular with American politicians, will increase health-care costs and decrease quality.

“The result will not be cheaper or more accessible pharmaceuticals in the United States,” Pipes said. “Domestic price controls will merely kill new pharmaceutical innovation, which would mean no new advances in drugs for Alzheimer’s, AIDS, diabetes, or anything else. In Canada, scores of drugs are excluded from provincial formularies, the practical effect of which is that patients do without them.”

Pipes argues that the result of reimportation of drugs from Canada, a politically popular idea, “will be many more bus trips south as Canadians add Soviet-style lines for pharmaceuticals to the already long queues for health-care services.”

Lessons from the North reveals:

• The true cost of “free” health care in Canada.
• Increasing waiting times for treatment in Canadian provinces.
• How Canada rations care and limits high-technology medicine.
• How provincial drug formularies force Canadians to look elsewhere for prescription drugs.
• Why drug reimportation will not help Canadians or Americans.
• How price controls will hurt the quality of health care by limiting research and development.

“Imitating Canada's failing government controlled system is no solution to America's health-care woes,” Pipes said. “If they want to provide Americans with better health care, legislators and policymakers need to learn the facts and implement deep reforms based on choice, responsibility, innovation, and sound economics.”

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About PRI
For more than two decades, the Pacific Research Institute (PRI) has championed individual liberty through free markets. PRI is a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to promoting the principles of limited government, individual freedom, and personal responsibility.