It's true, because some experts have actually estimated that if we adopted, for instance, the German system, we would save about $4 billion a year of what we're paying now. If we adopted the U.K. system, we would actually save $11 billion a year. I'm reading from the “Pharmacare 2020” plan. Because of the administrative cost savings of a single-payer pharmacare system, it's estimated to be $1 billion to $2 billion less than now.
Independent studies have confirmed this. You add up all those I think they were referred to as efficiencies. If you don't have someone covered for their medicine and they end up in emergency, it is far more expensive. If you add those kinds of savings in, preventative systems, the power of bulk, all of the aspects of it.... It seems to me that the experts who we're going to hear from in this committee will tell us that adopting national universal coverage in this country could save us money over what we're spending now. There's no free lunch, but if we had all those efficiencies we could actually get universal coverage cheaper than what we're spending now.
Is that a possibility?