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 medications, the kinds of medications that are demanded by patients, the decisions that are made in terms of efficient substitution between competing health care treatments.
Those kinds of things don't exist in our system. If we properly designed our public health plans, including our drug plans, with things like deductibles and co-payments, we could introduce proper economic incentives that would encourage the right decisions on those things. It would also free up spending to allow us to include a larger number of new health technologies, including new drugs, and give us the capacity to provide, under public plans, more of what is provided under private insurance. If you compare access to drugs under private insurance plans in the country, it's immediate and it's comprehensive, as soon as Health Canada says a drug is safe and effective. That does not occur under public drug plans. So if we simply mimic some of the things that are done in private plans, we could achieve the same thing.