The Sixth Estate

Yesterday I reported on a new Fraser Institute study by Brett Skinner and Mark Rovere, noting that the existing government drug system does not serve poor people well and claiming that the best way to fix the system is to make it harder for Canada to check whether drugs are safe and harder for poor people to afford the drugs when they are proven safe. By the way, Skinner really is a doctor, as the study says, but he is a doctor of political science, not medicine. I pointed out that the study is ethically challenged, and now it’s time to tear the substance to shreds, too.

Before I go on, let me make clear that the Fraser Institute is talking about a real problem here. But it’s not the problem they’re discussing. Right now, Canadians do not receive fair and timely access to new medications — what the Cancer Advocacy Coalition has called a “postal code lottery.” Take lymphoma, for instance. There are six important new medications that can save or extend the lives of people with this form of cancer that have been introduced over the past 15 years. In BC, you might be prescribed any of four of these medications (the two newest ones are still in review). In Ontario, by contrast, you only qualify for two. Why?

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The Fraser Institute’s latest propaganda piece is Access Delayed, Access Denied, an attempt to solve the very real problem of delayed access to important new medications in Canada by bogus methods, like more private insurance and less Canadian inspection of new drugs. This is a very silly idea, and I’ll get into that tomorrow, but first I have something very exciting to report. The Fraser Institute, it seems, has taken the long-offered advice of people like myself and instituted some important reforms to an editorial process that involves undisclosed conflicts of interest and long-dead editors serving, supposedly, as “final arbiters” in the peer review process.

Unfortunately, it fails miserably in the process. For instance, the Editorial Advisory Board has now been updated to indicate that five dead men are now merely former members. Their death had nothing to do with this demotion; they were dead, active members earlier this year. While this sounds impressive, it has all the hallmarks of a meaningless paper reshuffling. Sir Alan Walters is still listed as an active living member, despite the fact that he has been dead for two years. Whether other “members” have gone to meet their own final arbiter in the meantime, I haven’t checked. Apparently the Fraser Institute hasn’t checked either.

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Predictably, the Fraser Institute has joined the C.D. Howe Institute‘s recent call for the elimination of the Canada Health Act. The new offensive takes the form (for now) of a column published at Troy Media by economist Mark Rovere. He argues, on behalf of the Institute, that Canada should adopt Dutch-style compulsory private health insurance (the same thing the Obama administration was gunning for in the U.S., though Rovere doesn’t mention this). Various vague promises about cost savings are mentioned. He forgets to mention that the Fraser Institute’s backers include private medical companies. According to Allan Gotlieb, a former diplomat who now chairs two of the country’s largest conservative foundations, .

First of all, I would be very hesitant to take healthcare advice from any organization which believes that cigarette smoke does not cause lung cancer. (By the way, one of those disreputable studies can still be downloaded from the Fraser Institute website. Its distribution was paid for by tobacco companies.) I personally believe that the Fraser Institute’s current work on healthcare is also being funded by corporations in the medical sector who have a very definite interest in killing off universal non-profit healthcare so that they can sell us expensive insurance products and private healthcare.

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