Our paper is a peer-reviewed research paper in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. It's been out for over a year now, so other academics have had plenty of time to try to replicate, critique, or tear it apart in a formal and disciplined way, and no one has. That paper has recently won a national prize for its scholarship and its importance in helping policy in the country. I am positive that the paper is robust.
The critique that the Canadian Pharmacists Association commissioned from a pharmaceutical industry consulting firm makes a number of false assumptions about the paper. It included the assumption that we were solely basing our costing estimates on Canada versus U.K. prices, which is not the case. We looked at a wide window of prices, and recent Patented Medicine Prices Review Board data show that approximately 26 OECD countries fall within the range we used in our analysis.
They argued that we didn't take advantage of, or account for, the $490 million in negotiated rebates that our provinces get through negotiated contracts with drug manufacturers. We discussed in the paper that we deliberately did not do that because the rebates in Canada are smaller and apply to a smaller proportion of our market than comparable countries like the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Sweden, or Australia. If we were to have done what they suggested we should do, we would have added $1.5 billion in savings that we left out of our study.