The next question, then, is who is to administer it. If we think about a single-payer model, is it federally administered, or is it provincially and territorially administered like the rest of our health plan?
The conclusion I have come to is that the provinces spent $13.1 billion on public plans in the last year to insure their insured populations, so they already have robust payment mechanisms to pharmacists and others to support that public system.
This is something I don't like in this report. It says the cost to the federal government would be $20.4 billion, but in reality $13.1 billion is already being spent at the provincial level. If we think about who pays and how we afford it, there are other levels of payment. Private insurance was around $9 billion, but of that almost one-quarter went to municipalities, universities, schools, hospitals, and governments, which again are under provincial control, and they're able to extract payment.
By my math, if I look at what's already in public plans and look at that one-quarter of the insured workplace, $15.8 billion is covered, and we're really left looking for about $3.5 billion or $3.7 billion at the federal level. That's assuming we let all the employers off, so that all their employees are now insured and they don't have to cover benefits for them.
Does that make sense to you? Is that how you would see those numbers rolling out?