We think the catastrophic drug plan...that's our ask, actually. There needs to be a national catastrophic plan that ensures that no Canadian pays more than 3% of their annual income on prescribed medications, devices, and supplies. Because the common drug review isn't working, we're arguing that any drug approved by Health Canada and given the opportunity to be sold in Canada through the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board should be covered. Right now we have this problem, with each of the provinces providing different levels of access.
When the common drug review was first introduced, we thought, well, here's the foundation; it's going to be open and transparent, it's going to engage the stakeholders, we're actually going to move forward, and we will get closer to a catastrophic drug plan or some sort of national pharmacare program. It's not happening with the common drug review.
We could go to the model where the federal and provincial and territorial governments sit down to try to negotiate, but that, I hate to say, takes forever. So we would really encourage this committee to look at what's happening with all the four steps in the review process and see if there's some way to either make the common drug review work or find another model.
We were just talking. We weren't sure if diabetes is the only disease, but there's not been a single diabetes medication reviewed by the CDR that has been approved since it started. We don't know why.
Secondly, there's so much coming down the pipeline in new therapeutic treatments and new research discoveries that we're really afraid that Canadians with diabetes are going to end up with lower health outcomes than people with diabetes in Australia or the U.K. or in parts of Europe.
We have to get this right, and that's what we would encourage the committee to do.