Dr. Gagnon, you've already talked about the inefficiencies you see in the private system. You said that “$5 billion a year is wasted because private drug plans pay for unnecessarily expensive drugs and dispensing fees”, without any evidence of increased efficacy, I take it. You talked about “administration costs of for-profit private plans”. You've described them as “enormous: around 15%, while administration costs for public plans are less than 2%.”
Given these inefficiencies associated with private coverage, is a public single-payer pharmacare program, in your view, preferable to a mixed private-public system from a fiscal perspective?