Pharmacare cornerstone has been laid but where are the blueprints and budget? - Financial Post
The Liberals and NDP have reached a deal on pharmacare: a single-payer national plan that for now will cover only two drug categories: diabetes and birth control. Canada is the only developed country with universal insurance for hospital and physician services but not for prescription drugs, so covering this third pillar of the system makes sense. But whether the agreement will do that in a sensible way isn’t yet clear.
According to news reports, the negotiations hinged on two main points: what’s in and who pays. The NDP wanted more drug categories included, while the Liberals were concerned about costs. And while the NDP insisted on a single-payer national program, the Liberals had never committed to that and no information has…
In the book Zombie Economics, John Quiggin explained how dead ideas – assumptions about market economics refuted by the 2008-09 financial crisis – live on in the minds of many people, including those charged with cleaning up the mess. While not supported by evidence or analysis, these narratives persist as “dead ideas that still walk among us.” Why? Largely because they advance the interests of particular (typically elite) groups who want to believe in them and make them true.
Likewise, corporate governance best practices are typically based on intuition, opinion and rhetoric. Such thinking has been elevated – mandated by regulators and rated by a burgeoning class of governance experts for whom such standards become self-…
News that Canada’s inflation rate fell in January has prompted fresh debate about cuts in the Bank of Canada’s policy interest rate, which has been at five per cent since last July. Though the year-over-year increase in the CPI was just 2.9 per cent in January, which is getting nearer the two per cent target, many observers expect the Bank will keep interest rates where they are at its next announcement in April. Why the caution?
Partly because we’ve been here before: the CPI dropped below three per cent last spring, then sprang back up. And also because, despite January’s encouraging headline number, measures of core inflation are still well above three per cent.
There is a straightforward reason for…
