I think that's an important question, and sustainability of the health care system is certainly a debate that will not go away. I think it is important to examine other jurisdictions, being mindful of the fact, however, that there are certain unique characteristics in the Canadian health care system.
What I find in this debate is that there are a lot of people who produce reports on a weekly basis on the state of health care in our country, and sometimes what they try to do is cherry-pick. So, say, in France they do this well; why don't we do what they do in France? The problem with that is that France does a whole lot of other things that Canadians might find distasteful in their health care system or that certain elements of our health care system might find distasteful. I find it interesting sometimes that people say, well, France has more physicians per capita than Canada, which is a fact; they do. But they also treat physicians much more like employees rather than as professional partners in the health care system. So what I would say to the CMA or other interlocutors on this issue is that you can't cherry-pick; if you want us to go whole hog, say so. I suspect they would not.
So I think it is important to examine other jurisdictions. I'll just leave one more fact with you that I personally have been finding interesting. The U.K. government has spent billions and billions of pounds more on health care in the last few years as part of Prime Minister Blair and Gordon Brown's legacy. A recent report by the King's Fund, which some members of this committee might be familiar with, indicated that of all the additional spending—I think it worked out to something like 2% or 3% of GDP—in the U.K., 44% of it actually went to price inflation within health care rather than the actual delivery of more services to patients. That's the U.K. example. That's the age-old adage that more money, if spent unwisely, doesn't deliver better health care. It's how you spend the money to ensure increased access, better accountability, as Madam Bennett was talking about earlier. These issues that are extremely important to a properly functioning health care system.