Health committee  I would like to ask the chair for permission to leave early today. I have to catch a flight, and I had mentioned it to the clerk, actually, in advance of the meeting. So if that's okay, I would like to go first and then, after this answer, perhaps exit. In terms of estimating th

Health committee  We'll start on the last question. It was directed to me. My point was that the CDR was focused on cost and not on the actual value of the medications, that it's an exercise in cost containment, and for that reason I don't think it serves patients very well. So I'm providing an a

Health committee  The point of calling it a misguided war against medicines is simply to draw attention to the fact that the focus on cost containment and the focus on what we spend our health care dollars on is really misguided. At various points in the history of medicare, costs have been focuse

Health committee  I'm getting to that. Drugs are now the focus of attention on cost, and that is misguided. We shouldn't be focusing on what we spend our health care dollars on, but on how we finance the system, because how we finance the system introduces incentives for how we prescribe and use

Health committee  I would take a different perspective on this, one that is focused on consumer empowerment. The CDR is a central planning mechanism focused on cost concerns. It needs to evaluate the pharmaco-economic value of drug technology and other health technologies—if we expand it to those

Health committee  I would ask the member not to put words in my mouth. You may find disease examples where the catastrophic expenses are quite high. But for most people and the drugs that they access through our drug plans, that is not the case. A co-payment is a common strategy in private insur

Health committee  Deductible ranges help exclude those kinds of expenditures that are affordable and that people should be paying for out of pocket. Those are alternative ways of doing this. Not just the private sector does it, but of course, countries such as France have much higher expenditure

Health committee  I'd like to thank the chair and members of the committee, and the clerk of the committee for facilitating my appearance here today. To be brief, I'll just jump right into my comments. I have circulated an outline of what I'd like to present today. The three main points that I'd

Health committee  I apologize. The date of my appearance was changed and I only had last night to deliver the information electronically. I would like to present some evidence from a report I recently published that attempts to measure the number of reimbursement approvals by the provinces and co

Health committee  Actually, Lichtenberg's work has been replicated by others attempting to refute it, and they found exactly the same results.

Health committee  Sorry, I'm not aware of the statistics on that. But it would be in the thousands, the tens of thousands.

Health committee  On the basis of that observation...which is true; generics do not spend as much developing their products. In fact, from the research I've seen, the average cost of developing a new drug is more than $800 million U.S. One in 10,000 molecules discovered actually makes it to the ma

Health committee  Apotex is a generic company.

Health committee  I'd be happy to answer that one. Patent protection is granted to a product in exchange for the release of its data. So that would not normally occur without patent protection. Because that data is made public, that is the data set that is used by generic manufacturers to copy t

Health committee  Thank you for your comments. I would argue that the number of people directly affected by waiting times--for hospital services, for physicians, for access to medicines--is in fact very small. The evidence is clear on that. So the general population, the bulk of the population, d