Thank you very much for your testimony.
I have to say that I quite regret that we weren't able to hear your full 10-minute presentations because of timing on the committee, but if you would consider submitting your remarks, I can absolutely assure you that I and my colleagues will read them quite faithfully to make sure we've heard your full comments. So thank you for that and thank you for what you represent.
My first question is for Mr. Casey. It's dealing with the affordability of immunotherapy and biologics associated with immunotherapy. There's a really good example, I think, that we've read about. Paul Henderson, our very famous hockey player, was diagnosed with a form of leukemia and the treatment was Imbruvica. I'm probably mispronouncing that. It was very successful, but the cost of that is about $100,000 per year, and that could continue for the rest of a person's life, depending upon the response to it.
The median individual income in Canada is around $27,600. Even for the highest one per cent of Canadians, the average income is $381,000. So we come to the amazing new treatments and drugs that will absolutely lead to return to health and ongoing life, and how we afford them. We've also heard that the employer-based private sector plans, because of some of the burden of these new drugs, are either cutting back the percentage that they'll cover or simply cutting pharma significantly out of their benefit plans for their employees.
It strikes me that either we embrace the new technologies and through a national pharmacare program look to how we share the costs of these treatments collectively, or we end up with a very small percentage of Canadians who can afford a private insurance plan that would provide coverage.
Do you have any reaction, any thoughts, on how we make these drugs affordable, and any reaction to my comments about pharmacare versus private plans?