The impact of reference pricing of cardiovascular drugs on health care costs and health outcomes

On the other side of the ledger are the additional expenditures on ambulatory physician consultations (likely under $1 million), and the costs of the additional revascularization procedures, and the cost of the additional sublingual nitroglycerin dispensed to nitrates users. [...] Irrespective of the quality of the evidence of the effects of RP policies introduced internationally, the evidence may not necessarily be generalizable to the RP policy implemented in BC. [...] For example, the potential savings from RP depends on the spread between the highest priced drug and the maximum reimbursement price set by the Ministry of Health in the drug categories targeted by the policy: The bigger the spread, the bigger are the potential savings. [...] Shortrun effects occured within the first 4 months of the implementation of the policy; long run effects occured from the introduction of the policy to the end of the sample period, March 1998. [...] Hence our estimates of the effect of RP on the prevalent cohort likely provide an upper bound on the adverse health events associated with the effect of the RP policy on the prevalent cohort.