By
Chris Roberts
If you’re into marijuana—like, really
into marijuana—you should move to Canada. Particularly if you’re into
having your federal government license and permit a nationwide
medical-cannabis distribution system—and especially if you’d like having your employer-provided health insurance pick up the tab for your own personal stash.
A retired elevator mechanic in Nova
Scotia, left with chronic back pain after an on-the-job injury, recently
convinced a human-rights board that his union-provided insurance plan
must cover his medical-marijuana treatments.
And, as the CBC is reporting,
the binding ruling has cannabis advocates across the country convinced
that other insurers will follow suit—provided, of course that workers
push for it.
“If they could start to use this avenue
to try to get their employers or insurance providers to start covering
it, I think that’s going to be significant and we are going to see more
of that,” Deepak Anand, executive director of the Canadian National
Medical Marijuana Association, told the CBC.
The elevator repairman, Gordon “Wayne”
Skinner, succeeded in large part because his cannabis treatment was
prescribed by a doctor. This is one potential hangup for other marijuana
patients tired of their insurance coverage picking up the tab for
pharmaceutical drugs and not cannabis.
There are still many doctors, on both
Canada’s public option for healthcare (another advantage of living north
of the border) and on the private market, that do not view marijuana as
a medicine and thus do not write cannabis prescriptions, according to
the CBC. About two-thirds of Canadians are covered by private insurance.
But there are positive signs.
Several dozen private companies have
asked Canadian marijuana advocates about including cannabis in their
employee healthcare plans, according to Anand. And the Canadian
equivalent of Safeway recently announced that its employees’ insurance
would begin covering medical marijuana.
As Leafly News is reporting,
Loblaws Companies, which operates a supermarket and a drugstore chain
that employs 200,000 people, recently announced that its employee
benefits plans would cover medical marijuana. (This is mostly thanks to
the company executive, Galen G. Weston, who says he’d like his stores to
eventually carry marijuana products, possibly sometime after the
country legalizes cannabis, as it is expected to do by summer 2018.)
Currently, all legal cannabis in Canada
is grown, sold and distributed by one of about 40 companies with
licenses from Health Canada. Cannabis can only be sold to approved
patients, to whom their medicine is shipped directly.
In the United States, efforts to compel
employers or insurance companies to cover medical marijuana have been
met with mixed success. In New Mexico, state courts have ruled
that employees or retirees for whom medical marijuana is recommended
must have their cannabis treatments covered by their employer-provided
health insurance.
But, as the New York Times
reported, very few medical cannabis patients are covered in this way—and
in the case of the New Mexico patient whose cannabis was covered, he
also worked for a labor union (as many Americans don’t) with a good
health-care plan (ditto), and his condition for which cannabis was
recommended was also work-related.
And all cannabis patients in America with
low-income, government-subsidized healthcare like Medicaid or Medicare
are on their own, and must pay for their preferred medicine
out-of-pocket.
As it stands, merely using medical marijuana in the U.S. is a good way to lose your
health insurance: Employers still have the right to fire workers for
off-the-clock marijuana use under state and federal “Drug-Free
Workplace” laws.
Canada’s cannabis coverage could also stand to be better.
Currently, Health Canada doesn’t
officially view cannabis as an “official drug” (in the legitimate,
doctor-prescribed, “it’s a real medicine” sense). And insurance
officials commenting on the Skinner case told CBC that it’s still up to
individual plans to decide if they want to cover marijuana. But,
considering how far most Americans are from securing decent healthcare
of any kind—let alone anything that would even consider paying for
weed—Canada is a fantasyland.
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