Thank you very much, Chairperson, and thank you to the witnesses for being here and on the video conference today.
I guess if Canada were doing a bang-up job on health promotion and disease prevention we wouldn't be having this meeting today. It's certainly a big topic. I guess the crux of the problem is that it's something we all talk about, but we don't seem to do much about it in terms of where money goes or how we organize our health care systems and so on. I think it's a good opportunity to have a discussion about that.
Mr. Kershaw, I did want to focus on a couple of comments you made. I did quickly read your article from The Vancouver Sun, I think when it came out. You make some very good points, but there's one thing I don't quite agree with. I could be interpreting this wrongly, but I get the sense that you pit medicare against other social spending and say that it has to be either/or. I think the information that we've looked at shows that in actual fact, medicare costs, relative to the GDP, are pretty stable over a long period of time. It's the associated health costs like private drug costs, like other benefits, that are skyrocketing, particularly the drug costs. So I think we do have to differentiate.
I would certainly agree with your three policy choices. I think they're absolutely critical in terms of health promotion, healthier families, healthier communities. But it seems to me that nobody is saying the status quo in the health system is okay. It's very much under challenge. I think our challenge is to strengthen medicare and to make sure that we are focusing on disease prevention, on keeping people out of ERs, having much better community health centres, primary care reform, and so on.
I just wonder if you could clarify that when you say let's consider a cap on medical care spending. I think you say the greatest barrier to social policy is medical care. I have some concern about how you pose that question, because I see them as part of the same package. It's like here's the pie, and yes, the pie has shrunk because public revenue has gone down--you're totally correct on that--but then how do we make the pie more efficient?
Could you address that?