Overall, I think what we do recognize is that many of these drugs, because they are being developed for very small patient populations, can come in at a very high individual cost—though it's not true for all of them. I will give you a bit of a reality check. If we think about all the drugs that are now currently being funded for rare diseases, including some that you've heard about as being very expensive, the cost still amounts to only 0.7% of the public drug budget because the numbers are very small. A very good projection that was recently made by researchers in Europe, where there's much better drug coverage for these rare disease drugs than we have here in Canada, is that because of the rates of development, the numbers involved, and the fact that when you develop a drug for one of these rare diseases many of the patients come on right away—so it's not likely you're going to get a continuing increase in these patients—at most it would never be more than between 3% and 6% of the total. That was their estimate.
On May 2nd, 2013. See this statement in context.