Before I came to the PMPRB, I worked at the Competition Bureau and dealt with many different industries and sectors of the economy. Everybody wants price certainty. No one gets it. What you want is the most predictability and visibility in the regime, but there is no country that I'm aware of where a company can go back to its headquarters, and say this is the price we're going to get before it goes through the various processes, the HTA process, the negotiation process.
It would be nice if we could provide perfect certainty. We're certainly aspiring to bright-line tests in the new framework that is being contemplated, but at the end of the day, this is the one concern that is recurrent from industry that has some legitimacy in Canada.
It really is like a relay race at times. We are working more collaboratively. We are working to collapse processes and have them run concurrently, instead of consecutively, but at the end of the day, we have a federal health and safety regulator. We have a pan-Canadian HTA regulator. We have a federal price ceiling regulator, and we have the pCPA. We have a patchwork of coverage in the market, public payers by the pCPA and private insurers.
There's no question that by not having a single national buying authority, reimbursement authority, to harness the collective buying power of the populace, we are leaving money on the table. That's why, at the end of the day, PMPRB exists. It's to compensate for the fact, by having a regulator, we don't have a national reimbursement authority or negotiating authority. Drugs are not part of our publicly funded health care system.