Ontario will expand funding of the drug Soliris, a medication that can cost more than $700,000 per year for people with a rare kidney disorder. However, the country’s drug-price regulator argues the drug-maker is charging more for Soliris in Canada than in other countries.
To complicate matters, an advocacy group for sufferers of the rare kidney disorder receive financial donations from the drug-maker. It’s a practice that is both common and troubling, says Michael Law of UBC’s Centre for Health Services and Policy Research.
“As soon as you get a patient group that gets themselves on TV, gets themselves in the newspaper, it becomes very difficult as a drug-plan manager to say no,” he said. “I don’t know that it’s ever going to be possible to completely isolate it totally from the politics. You can always have a story about somebody with a rare disease who’s ill. And those are horrible stories.”
