Here today, gone tomorrow: The issue attention cycle and national print media coverage of prescription drug financing in Canada

Jamie R. Daw, Steven G. Morgan, Paige A. Thomson and Michael R. Law

Health Policy, 2013, vol. 110, issue 1, 67-75

Abstract: Canada is the only developed country that has established universal coverage for hospital care and physician services that excludes medically necessary prescription drugs. Lack of public interest in expanding universal coverage to prescription medicines may be one critical factor in explaining this policy puzzle. Historical levels and patterns of attention to financing issues in the media may have implications for public awareness and support for such major health reform. We thus examined the quantity, context, and patterns of coverage of public drug financing in national print media in Canada from 1990 to 2010. We conducted a time series analysis of monthly newspaper article counts to quantify trends in coverage and analyzed article content by applying Down's theory of the “issue-attention cycle” of political attention. We found that baseline coverage of this issue was low throughout the past twenty years with few cycles of increased attention, initiated by focusing events related to general health reform. Issue-attention cycles were driven by coverage of proposed policy solutions simultaneously accompanied by lower levels of coverage of policy problems and barriers to change, before fading rapidly from attention. The observed patterns of media coverage and the intrinsic characteristics of this policy issue suggest that any momentum for reform (or lack thereof) is likely to be driven by elite members of the policy community rather than by way of public engagement. This has implications for the probability of reform and which options may be considered or eventually implemented, as policies developed within elite policy communities may tend to reflect niche interests rather than being reflective of principled policy goals.

Keywords: Pharmaceutical policy; Health care financing; Media; Health care reform; Canada (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016885101300016X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:hepoli:v:110:y:2013:i:1:p:67-75

DOI: 10.1016/j.healthpol.2013.01.006

Access Statistics for this article

Health Policy is currently edited by Katrien Kesteloot, Mia Defever and Irina Cleemput

More articles in Health Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu () and ().