Ontario has announced changes to their existing drug plans. If you are a child and have private insurance, by way of your parents I would assume, you no longer get your drugs free under the provincial plan. Should you have no insurance then you remain covered by the government plan. There should be no difference at the local level in distrusting pills to sick kids. This is good, sort of. At least it should be! Right? It will save the government money as it goes forward and that is a good thing right? That should lower taxes and this is a good thing. Right? Well there are two tracks, the personal and the governmental to follow. First, the personal path; As the government is saving costs by dumping on insurance companies, they costs are forwarded to consumers who have to pay increased premiums to cover the additional costs now borne by government for what used to be a public cost is now a private cost. So what happens? Profits are a percentage of sales, so by increasing premiums, so increase the profits. Insurance companies unlike the government are there to make money. So costs go up for private plans. This knocks off the marginalized working poor whose premiums go up such that they cannot afford insurance any longer. So no more dentistry, no glasses, and nothing that private insurance would have covered. But children still have their pills. See what might have cost all of Ontario pennies each will cost the work poor real money off their pay. Money they will no longer afford to pay. Do we really want to have people asking such American questions as; “Do I buy us food or do I buy my kids glasses and dental care.” When you live on the margins, such a question is very real.

But this great for the government supply side right? Not so much, by reducing the amount of people covered, they increase their own bulk buying costs. The predictable cost is now unpredictable, when you cover all children; you get all the range of problems. But as people are covered by private insurance this is subject to change year over year in a non linear function. Furthermore as people are forced off insurance due to rising costs, the state will have to pay in other cost related expenses due to less medical care that was once covered by insurance for poor and marginalized people. Long terms costs can be seen in that people with less ability to buy glasses will read less, and learn less and be more likely to stop school earlier then they could have achieved.

The one thing this is good for, and it is not citizens of the province but the companies. Drug companies will charge more per pill. Insurance companies will earn more profits on high costs per policy. But at least the people will get a tax break right? No not really. The savings will not trickle down to them, and if it did, as they are only paying pennies for their share of such a program, they will get pennies back. All in all, this plan is a loser neo con agenda to strip people of entitlements that are paid for collectively.