Very quickly, I'll add that there are several things we can learn from several high-performing systems around the world. The key ingredient is that your drug plan has to have a budget.
In fact, some of the best performing drug plans in the world are in every Canadian hospital that Canadians use on a regular basis. Our hospitals have drug budgets from which they carefully manage expenditures. They have formulary committees that make tough decisions about what drugs are on formulary for hospitals and which ones are not. They buy all of their medicines in bulk because the budget forces them to do so. That also forces manufacturers to give them better prices; otherwise, there will be no sales to a particular hospital or to a particular province.
Look to Canadian hospitals. Look to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs' health administration, one of the best run drug programs in the world. It happens in the United States, one of the fiercest markets in terms of pharmaceutical cost pressures, and yet they've had virtually flat expenditures per beneficiary for the last couple of decades.
Look to Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. All of these countries have lessons we can learn. We'd be happy, I'm sure, to provide more details if you have questions following these committee hearings about what it is that you can learn from each of those examples.