I'll take that on because of the study that we published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal about how much it would cost to provide a reasonably comprehensive drug benefit for the community in Canada. That's not including hospitals and long-term care, but in retail pharmacy we estimated that the direct increased cost to governments was $3.4 billion, if I recall correctly, $2.4 billion of which would be recouped in some sense by reduced cost of the taxpayer-financed extended heath benefits for public sector employees, including, likely, all of you and myself. It's about $3.4 billion to expand the program and to generate about $8 billion in savings to the private sector by way of reduced need for them to be paying either out of pocket for their medicines or a reduced demand on private insurance for drugs.
In and of itself, the program paid for itself. But we didn't—and we make note of this in the Canadian Medical Association Journal article—take on the second argument that you are raising, which is a very important one, the argument about the incremental effect on our health care system. There are very good trials that have demonstrated that lowering the copayments for even relatively wealthy insured beneficiaries of private insurance in the United States improves access to preventative treatments and reduces the demands on medical and hospital care sufficiently so that, in the U.S. market, that's revenue neutral, not accounting for the savings in prices that one gets for it.
It's almost certain that this program would pay for itself, in some sense twice, once by way of increased purchasing power, and twice by way of better health for patients and therefore a reduced demand on the health care system.
Do I think we're going to see savings actually realized in health care? No. But I think we'll see health care resources being able to address other unmet needs in health care, and that would be a great thing for Canadians.