#BitterestPill

Ontario cancer patients younger than 65 years must navigate a maze of financial and administrative challenges to access innovative and effective take-home cancer treatments that are easily and affordably available to patients in other provinces and territories. This is because the treatment they need comes in pill form taken at home rather than in the hospital.

How is this fair?

Imagine living in Ontario and while fighting for your life you encounter this stressful process just to get cancer treatments your doctor has prescribed:

• Step 1: Exhaust all private pay options – including maxing out your private drug insurance if you have it.
• Step 2: Apply to the Ontario Trillium Drug Program – encountering risky delays that take an average of one month for approval.
• Step 3: Pay the government an average $4,000/year deductible while working on a reduced income during cancer treatment.

To put it simply: Canadians living in our Western Provinces, Northern Territories and Quebec have better, faster and more affordable access to advances in cancer treatments than patients in Ontario. Regardless of age, socioeconomic status, or cancer type – when patients in these regions receive their diagnosis, they will be prescribed the approved treatment they need and get it when they need it.

Ontario’s cancer funding is a decade behind the majority of Canada. This is unacceptable.

For approximately $30 million/year, Ontario can close the gap and provide significant financial and emotional relief to patients and their families. That is just 1/10th of 1% of the estimated $63 billion that Ontario spent on healthcare in 2020.

Scroll below for our campaign milestones over the years.

The time is now for all political parties to commit to equal access to take-home cancer drugs in their platforms.

Rethink and the #BitterestPill Campaign in 2024

• March 25, 2024 — MJ DeCoteau, Rethink’s Founder + Executive Director, put out a blog, Bitter about #BitterestPill, in regards to the upcoming Ontario budget announcement and the fact that funding to improve access to take-home cancer drugs was not included.

Read the blog here

• March 27, 2024 — Ontario Budget Announcement confirms that there is no funding to improve access to take-home cancer drugs, despite the Government’s commitment to address this issue two years ago. Rethink encouraged the community to write a letter to Sylvia Jones, Ontario’s Minister of Health, to express their disappointment about the lack of progress on #BitterestPill with a letter template linked here.

Read MJ’s email on the announcement here.

Rethink and the #BitterestPill Campaign in 2022

• January 24, 2022 — Petition calling for all political parties to commit to equal access to take-home cancer drugs in their platforms ahead of the Ontario General Election on June 2, 2022 launched
• April 3, 2022 — Rethink takes Queen’s Park for an Advocacy Day with a stunt focused on jumping through hoops much like the cancer patients in Ontario have to
• May 22, 2022 — Rethink was excited to share the ground-breaking news that for the first time, all political parties in Ontario committed to tackling the inequities faced by cancer patients who need take-home cancer drugs.
• June 2, 2022 — The Ontario Progressive Conservatives are remaining in office and made a commitment to bring together an advisory table to explore improvements to access to take-home cancer drugs.
• November 16, 2022 — With no progress being made, MPPs and government representatives across Ontario were asked to put themselves in the shoes of someone being impacted by this inequity, each receiving a pharmacy bag, with a pill bottle inside, which instead of containing take-home cancer drugs, contained the lengthy, 9.5-foot-long list of various hoops patients have to jump through in order to get the medication they’ve been prescribed for their cancer treatment while fighting for their life. We called on those receiving those pharmacy bags to do their part in addressing these barriers to take-home cancer treatments in Ontario