Thank you for the question, Ms. Davies.
As I mentioned during my remarks, we already have some of the infrastructure to do what we're suggesting. The Health Council of Canada has already set up this innovation portal. They're already becoming a repository for best practices. We need to empower them more. We need to provide funding for provinces that are interested in benefiting from the innovations happening in other parts of the country.
We do this on two levels. One is this health services level, but one of the other bodies I mentioned was something equivalent to NICE, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, which is the U.K. body, in Canada. This is something B.C. has done with the therapeutics initiative. It's a body that assesses the effectiveness of new pharmaceuticals before they become funded by the province's formulary for publicly funded drug plans. After it was started, costs in that drug plan were reduced by 8%. This is with just one province doing this by itself. This is not something that's happening across the country. In fact, this could be part of a national pharmacare strategy as well, which is also something that would be quite innovative for the country.
If I could take a step back and talk about how we see the 2014 health accord collectively, we see this innovation piece as one portion of it, but we think a renewed health accord also has to have a few other important pieces. One I mentioned is getting away from the per capita funding that was announced a little over a year ago, because it penalizes small less populous provinces. If New Brunswick wants to buy an MRI machine, that's quite expensive for that province to do because of its size, and it won't have the additional funding to provide other health services because of the per capita funding.
We'd also like to see the federal government enforce the Canada Health Act. Every day we hear about more and more clinics that are charging illegal user fees. Helios Wellness Clinic in Calgary has been in the news. There's an inquiry regarding patients paying $10,000 membership fees to be members of this clinic and then jumping the line for colon cancer screening in a public system. The Cambie clinic in Vancouver is a private for-profit orthopedic centre, and it's been found to be illegally billing patients for publicly insured services. These are all violations of the Canada Health Act. We need to add some accountability to a health accord and make funding conditional on enforcing the Canada Health Act.
We also need to develop a shared set of priorities through the 2014 health accord. Writing cheques isn't enough; we need some national unity on this issue.