CHSPR Seminar | How will recent trade agreements impact Rx expenditures and generic access in Canada?

Reed Beall, University of Calgary

Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2019
12-1 pm
Room 219 (within 201), 2206 East Mall
School of Population and Public Health
University of British Columbia

Canada recently entered into two multinational trade agreements (i.e., the Canada, United States, and Mexico Trade Agreement; and the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement with the European Union). The resulting federal policy changes will prolong periods of market protection afforded to eligible brand-name prescription drugs by extending competition-blocking patent and data exclusivity terms. While previous studies have analysed these two policy changes in isolation, it remains unknown what the total combined impact will be in a typical year. Our objective was to design an analytic approach that can assess more than one change to a country’s market protections and then to apply this methodology to the Canadian context. We find that the collective impact of these policy changes will be to extend the regulatory protection period for new drugs from an average of 10.0 years to 11.1 years. Depending upon the model’s assumptions and all contingencies considered, an 11% increase equated to an average of $410 million annually (with a minimum estimate of $40 million and a maximum of $1.4 billion). Despite this uncertainty, we conclude that such methodological approaches could be useful for rapidly evaluating potential policy changes prior to adoption, which may further assist in budget planning to mitigate the possibility of increased cost to the downstream health authorities most impacted by these trade concessions.

Reed F. Beall is a population health researcher who works largely with medicine patent, regulatory, and utilization data to investigate the long-term impacts of national and international policy decisions which aim to balance incentives between equitable drug innovation and equitable drug access. He is an Assistant Professor in Healthcare Policy in the Department of Community Health Sciences within the Cumming School of Medicine and at the O’Brien Institute for Public Health at the University of Calgary. He also serves as affiliated faculty for the Program on Regulation, Therapeutics, and the Law (PORTAL) based within the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

A light lunch is included in this seminar. Please contact Joyce (chspr.reception@ubc.ca) to RSVP for lunch by Friday Nov. 1. You may also join remotely via GoToMeeting: https://global.gotomeeting.com/join/297740069. Please let Joyce know if you would like to join this way.