Paying for HIV prevention

Imagine moving from one province to another and finding that the costs of your prescription medications aren’t covered in your new home. While the Canada Health Act provides for comparable levels of medical care from province to province, the same is not true when it comes to paying for life-saving medicines, including HIV meds...NDP health critic Libby Davies says if the Martin government had attached funding conditions for a pharmacare strategy back in 2004, the Harper government wouldn’t be dragging its feet now. Still, she says, the Conservative government should move forward on the matter now. “I think it’s very unfair, and in fact one could argue that it’s very discriminatory and completely contrary to the Canada Health Act, that depending on where you live or on your income, that you may or may not get the drugs that you need for HIV/AIDS,” says Davies. “To me, that’s structural discrimination. It’s more evidence of why we’ve got to fix this, and we shouldn’t be waiting until 2014.”