Finance committee  I'd like to thank the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance for this opportunity to present on behalf of Canadian Doctors for Medicare. My name is Dr. Richard Klasa. I'm a medical oncologist at the BC Cancer Agency in Vancouver and a clinical research scientist at the r

Finance committee  Okay. However, the capacity of provinces to implement pharmacare-like strategies is limited in the absence of a national formulary. C.D. Howe pharmacare expert Steve Morgan cautions that any attempt to institute a national pharmacare strategy requires active leadership from the

Finance committee  As stated in our brief, we feel that for any plan—and we focused particularly on a pharmacare plan—to be successful, strong federal leadership would be required to engage the provinces and set the standards. We wish that all the provisions of the Canada Health Act and the Medical

Finance committee  Very briefly, I think the problem has been that a lot of these activities have been siloed in different health care jurisdictions. There is no real reason that it can't happen.

Finance committee  There are two different parts to that question. The gaps in the Canada health accord have to do with the different provincial jurisdictions and the ways in which the funding comes to them currently. At the present time, I'm not an expert but my understanding is that in the curre

Finance committee  Undoubtedly, the federal government should have a major role in doing this and providing leadership in many initiatives. The issue again is that provinces are somewhat siloed and separated in terms of how they have traditionally dealt with their health care issues. What one wou

Finance committee  I don't know that I can address the issue of dementia, but there are many experts here on dementia. Certainly in terms of care for the elderly in general, one of the major issues of our time, and perhaps it's coming into its time now, is that we have to shift from a medicare sy

Finance committee  The case that's before the B.C. Supreme Court now involves a suit and then a countersuit that basically involves the provincial health care authority. The main protagonists here are Cambie Surgeries Corporation, the provincial government PHSA in terms of the Ministry of Health, a

Finance committee  It certainly is one of the things. We are there because we believe that the medicare system deserves to be protected, but also deserves to be changed and reformed as is required by the times. It's not as though we're for a static medicare system of all things going on as before,

Finance committee  Yes. It seems counterintuitive, the idea being, for those who propose it, that you can take people waiting in line who have resources, move them into the private sector, get them off the rolls, and that will make both systems function well and the public system will be more effic

Finance committee  In essence, what we've looked at, and what a number of other organizations, including the CMA, have now looked at and agreed with us is we are overpaying drastically in terms of our drug costs. Part of that has to do with where we're located on the planet, but the other part of i

Finance committee  It is a huge amount. If you look at the figures, it is quite shocking how much more expensive certain drugs are here than in other jurisdictions. That's detailed in the brief.

Finance committee  Again, funding is necessary to deliver the services that we deliver across the country. There is no question that our population demographics are shifting somewhat. This requires perhaps a modicum of more spending, but that really isn't the big issue. To me the big issue is the d

Finance committee  Well, one can set up coordinations, I guess, in different ways. I'll let my colleagues speak to their areas of expertise. In mine, if I could do it all my way, then I would say, if we had a national cancer program as opposed to just provincial cancer programs, we could be more

Finance committee  How specifically the funding helps?