Thank you.
Yes, I mentioned briefly in my comments that we were very disappointed in the changes. You're right, in 2006 the government had taken steps to seal off evergreening, to make it much more difficult to add on patents. And then after the government did that, the Supreme Court validated that and said yes, that was the law.
The government has said that anything prior to 2006 that was on a patent list at Health Canada--which gives a brand company an automatic right to stop a generic--can go back on the list. So we're very concerned; we think the regulations are difficult to interpret, but right now our patent experts are telling me that very large drugs that have not yet been genericized could get extra protection through these extra patents.
Take a drug like Lipitor, which has sales of $1.1 billion. Again, if I just do a very rough calculation here.... I mentioned earlier that we've negotiated new pricing regimes with Ontario and Quebec, so the generics are down to no more than 50% of the brand. As soon as we're able to come to market, on Lipitor alone we will bring savings of $500 million to $600 million a year--that's on one drug--for the health care system.
So these are very large numbers we're talking about here. The provinces, as we know, pick up most of the drug costs in Canada for seniors and people on social assistance.