Thanks very much.
Thank you for coming back, because I think we had a few questions that came, as you could tell, from the hearings. I think the committee wants to go forward, not backwards. I don't think anybody wants to see the kind of collaboration Mr. Wright has talked about going backwards; we want to go forward.
What keeps coming back to me is, are we doing this upside-down? I was a family doctor, and I have great sympathy for the Best Medicines Coalition because it really did come together from a couple of groups that knew, because of their unbelievable networks, whether it was HIV/AIDS or cancer, that people were getting drugs in other places around the world that they weren't getting access to. This came from a real patient empowerment, networking, self-help approach, in terms of, “How come they can get this in Buffalo and I can't get it, and it may save my life?” The story around the kidney cancer drug upset us. That obviously was something about which the community felt very strongly.
If we were really going to move to a formulary, which is where we want to be, and with the way we would make these decisions, wouldn't we start with clinical guidelines first and then defy any government to not pay for something that's on a clinical guideline? This is about patient empowerment and saying the best drug for this is that. I would have assumed that the kidney cancer drug, Nexavar, or whatever it was, would have ended up in a clinical guideline if you asked a bunch of kidney cancer doctors what to do.
From the empowerment of patients who know what's happening around the world now, from the Internet, to actually pushing the medical profession to get going on clinical guidelines, to then making your jobs easier--because if it were in a clinical guideline, surely when the people who know the most about these diseases.... Now we have some stupid extra cancer system, and we're worried that everybody else is going to want a separate system if we don't get this right. It has to be what's best for patients and what brings Canadians in line internationally.
I'd like to hear a plan for going forward. How do we get the clinical guidelines? Also, how are you planning to involve--