You're correct, in that, of course, there are a number of private plans. That said, it's important to keep in mind that the public sector, for various historical reasons, has more of the so-called private plans than even the private sector. What we're talking about is that on the public side, whether you're talking about the federal government or provincial governments, it's really a reallocation of a public budget.
When it comes to the private plans, as we know, those have been shrinking in proportion to the number of Canadian workers simply because of the fact that these plans tend to be concentrated among the larger companies and more unionized workforces. We know that the level of unionization has dropped and that more and more companies have shifted, and are dropping or are reducing, their benefits and their private plans because of their cost.
Of course, that does not deny the fact that there is going to be some cost that would be required. There's no easy way to deal with that except for the federal government. Let's say it were a largely federally financed plan, as opposed to a federal-provincial plan. It's a little bit easier for the federal government to do this in a sense. It may involve a very small type of tax hike in the short run, but that too would involve largely a reallocation on the federal government's part, because currently the Canada health transfer is set at 25% and slightly above all provincial health expenditures.
I don't want to get into detail about this, but the earlier social compact on that was it was supposed to be 50% of all provincial medicare expenditures. It went down to 25% because of the block transfer through the EPF in the 1970s.