Yes, if I may.
I have a couple of things to highlight in terms of the probability or possibility of moving forward. We can learn a bit from countries that have reorganized the way they cover medicines in their countries in recent years.
New Zealand created this purchasing agency referred to as PHARMAC in 1993. It didn't exist for decades prior to that.
There's no other country in the world that doesn't have universal drug coverage as part of their health insurance in the postwar era. All countries that developed their systems developed drugs and health care together. Canada is the only outlier in that regard.
We can look to New Zealand's purchasing agency. We can look to the United States Department of Veterans Affairs' health administration. They reorganized how they purchase their medicines also about two decades ago. We can look to Sweden which more recently reorganized how they purchase their medicines.
To give you an idea of how important it is to defray the political tension that comes from having manufacturers demanding prices for medicines that may not be justified, there are a growing number of countries around the world that are coming together and buying their medicines together across national boarders. We can't even do this in Canada across provinces, and yet the Scandinavian countries have developed a purchasing consortium that will be rolling out this coming year and will buy medicines on behalf of multiple Nordic countries.
A number of Russian-speaking nations are now creating a single market for pharmaceuticals, including single regulatory processes and single coverage decision-making processes.
Even the Dutch and the Belgians are joining together in purchasing medicines, that is, in making these difficult decisions as two countries coming together and binding themselves to the same formulary. It's precisely because they do not want the political tension, the political pressure, to fund the drug just because their neighbour does. They want to fund drugs based on value for money, not peer pressure.