You sort of anticipated where I was going with that, so thanks for that.
I want to pierce the veil of secrecy that seems to be such a part of this whole pricing of prescription drugs in this country. We had Dr. Joel Lexchin who said that:
drug companies will not open up their books to reveal their R and D costs for new medications. There's a figure of $2.6 billion that's bandied around as being the cost of getting a new drug to market. That kind of figure is based on confidential data that won't be released. If drug companies want to prove that they need to charge these significant amounts of money that they do for new drugs, then they should prove to Canadians and to insurers that those prices are actually justified. However, so far, they haven't.
To what degree, Mr. Clark, are drug companies' research and development costs for a particular drug revealed or considered in PMPRB reviews on excessive pricing?