A Canadian list of essential medicines to be publicly funded is crucial for implementing national universal pharmacare. The federal government maintains multiple medicine lists of publicly funded medicines for specific populations in Canada. Despite significant overlap across these lists, Canada does not yet have a single list that defines a minimum set of publicly funded medicines for everyone in Canada. Instead of creating a list from scratch, extant federal lists could form the basis for a harmonized list for all Canadians. We examined seven federal lists of publicly funded medicines and made recommendations for a potential future Canadian essential medicines list.
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