The first thing is that in a multi-payer, fragmented system of both public and private payers, you have very different rules of access everywhere. They're by jurisdiction and they're by individual, depending on where that individual sits. Is that person on social assistance? What is their income, etc.? It depends on whether they have the kind of job that will continue to have an employment-based plan that will be fairly rich.
What can you do about access? Generally, in terms of this mixed picture, you can try to improve the equity of access so that there are not entire regions of the country, such as the Atlantic region, that really suffer in terms of access because they have very thin provincial programs and, on top of that, there are many fewer private plans. In a sense, you have a whole region of the country at a disadvantage.
That would be the first step. How do you address that?
It's very hard to address that issue through a very incremental approach when you have this kind of fragmented system. That's why you have had a lot of evidence before you over the last few weeks on the benefits of national pharmacare: because that's the only way you can really address the issue of equity of access in a really fundamental way.