Universal Drug Benefits for Seniors: Unnecessary, Unsustainable, and Unfair

Provincial governments in Canada have special, publicly funded, programs that reimburse seniors for their spending on prescription drugs. The United States recently passed federal legislation, the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act (MMA 2003), which grants universal eligibility to seniors for public funding of prescription drugs. This study argues that the age-based universal entitlement provided by seniors' drug-benefit programs is unnecessary and inefficient relative to more limited policy options, and is unfair to the rest of the population.