I would be pleased to answer that.
The importance of the health accords was their focus on five major strategic choices that would in fact improve on the delivery of health care overall. That was the last set of accords. The opportunity now arises to not necessarily add lots more money to the current spending and federal transfers, but to do it more wisely, to be much more targeted so that there is money in fact to do what people need and want, which is to age gracefully at home. If you do that, you have the opportunity to actually bring down your health care budget, because you are at the same time taking them out of institutional care, likely preventing additional conditions worsening and drawing upon the acute care system and so on. So there is an opportunity for cost savings in huge amounts of money. We're not saying take money away from anything. We are saying restructure it so that you're actually getting more value for the dollars that are spent.
In terms of prevention, the opportunity there arises because we know that one of the original promises of medicare was prevention, health promotion—don't get sick, don't get into the formal health care system. The ethic now among Canadians has been to look at healthy aging, and there's an opportunity even as people are already older that they can prevent the onset of chronic disease.
If we put all this there, the chances are that we'll be saving dollars later. Our membership tends to be very cautious of fiscal balance. They will pay dollars, pay taxes for good public services, but they just hate waste in any form whatsoever. So they want to hear sensible solutions that re-manage, restructure how we're spending now $192 billion a year. We're certainly not taking money away from curative efforts. We are looking at using our money more wisely, to prevent having to get into that system.