I have so many questions today, Mr. Chair. Thank you very much.
This is excellent, because I think in the scenario that I'm looking at, it appears we're being asked to perform surgery on a very important program in Canada without first coming up with a diagnosis. There's more than one way to get the solution that we would like. I think, Mostafa, you said there still will be private care because the public health care system won't cover everything.
My impression from some of the witnesses is that they don't want a private system. They do want a monopolistic type of system, one system, in which perhaps bureaucrats or different groups of individuals would decide which drugs would be covered. That's one of my concerns.
The decisions we make, first of all, are going to be expensive one way or another, but we do want to make sure at the end of the day that we're actually solving the problem that's out there, and we don't really have up-to-date statistics on it. Do you agree that it's important to gather sufficient data on the number of Canadians who either lack prescription drug coverage or have insufficient drug coverage, in order to properly estimate the cost implications of a universal public national pharmacare program?