We did meet senior finance department officials who were actually responsible for crafting the legislation. Their concern was about tax policy and not about other consequences—namely, of course, in our area, health policy—or about how the rubber hit the road in terms of how this impacted on the delivery of patient care, or how physicians were organized in order to deliver patient care, or that the synergy of physician groups, whether they be radiologists or surgeons or others, would be affected.
In a sense, tax policy is colliding with both federal and provincial health policies. The federal health policy that governs all health administration across the country is the Canada Health Act. Physicians are in a purely publicly funded health care system, and that's what we're talking about.
The synergy of 20 physicians working together is more than 20 physicians working individually. For the past 30 years, accepted health policy in this country has been about getting physicians to work in teams with other teams of physicians in order to avoid having patients fall between these cracks and to provide a much higher level of care.
That level of care is an intricate combination of general practice, general skills, specialty skills, subspecialty skills, and in tertiary care centres like teaching hospitals, even super-specialized care, in which very unique skills are located that are vitally important for the delivery of the full landscape, the full waterfront, of what patients are expected to receive in our health care systems across the country.
