Date/Time
Date(s) - 25/05/2023
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm

Speaker
Emmanuel Guindon, associate professor, HEI.

Description of Emmanuel’s talk:
Increasing spending and use of prescription drugs pose an important challenge to governments that seek to expand health insurance coverage to improve population health while controlling public expenditures. Patient cost-sharing, such as deductibles and coinsurance, is widely used with aim to control healthcare expenditures without adversely affecting health.

We first conducted a systematic umbrella review to examine the association of prescription drug insurance and cost-sharing with drug use, health services use, and health, and identified a gap in the literature pertaining to the effects of drug insurance and cost-sharing in a Canadian context. Second, we conducted a systematic review of Canadian studies. Forty-three studies met our inclusion criteria. The expansion of drug insurance was associated with increases in drug use, individuals who reported drug insurance generally reported higher drug use, and increases in and higher levels of drug cost-sharing were associated with lower drug use. Although a number of studies found statistically significant associations between drug insurance or cost-sharing and health services use, the magnitudes of these associations were generally fairly small. Among five studies that examined the association of drug insurance and cost-sharing with health outcomes, one found a statistically significant and clinically meaningful association.

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