As have been outlined, I think there are several different levels that are needed. The first is that there needs to be some sort of national pharmacare program to deal with the reality that millions of Canadians cannot really afford the medications they're taking, or need to take. That is a very serious issue. We also need to deal with the fact that there is a real waste of administrative costs on financing private drug insurance programs. That's one of the main reasons that Justice Emmett Hall concluded that medicare was a waste of administrative costs with hundreds of companies selling medical insurance. That would be a great savings.
Then we also need to get better regulation around the safety of drugs at the national level. I think the federal government also has a major role, as has been mentioned, to try to do something about developing a common drug list, which the provinces cannot do themselves, and also to move into improving the prescribing, because that's another huge issue. Reference-based pricing, which has been mentioned, can be of great assistance to payers and to providers in ensuring that the right drugs are being prescribed. When Vioxx, an anti-arthritic drug, was costing the Ontario drug benefit plan $55 million in 2003, it was being held under really tight control. I think just a few million dollars were spent on it in B.C. because of reference-based pricing. Of course, Vioxx was taken off the market the year before, as it may have caused 30,000 to 40,000 premature deaths from heart attacks in the United States, and maybe several thousand in Canada. But in B.C., because of reference-based pricing, it was largely not prescribed as much as in Ontario, which saved the province a lot of money and the lives of dozens of people.
Finally, the federal government has been talking for almost 20 years now about helping the provinces reform primary health care, and for its own fiduciary responsibility to its own groups—