The fact that we have a medicare system excluding pharmacare is an anomaly in this world.
Right now we have this pan-Canadian purchasing alliance. We are doing these PLAs, product listing agreements. The official price for selling drugs sometimes is much higher than the real price we're paying based on these PLAs. The PLAs are what the public pharmacare programs can afford in terms of negotiations, but then you have the people with private coverage or people with no coverage at all. In the system we have in Canada, they are still stuck with paying the artificially inflated prices having no negotiation capacity.
The fact that we're asking people to pay.... If you have a drug, you can negotiate, for example, on the specific drug, let's say a rebate of 75%. Your co-payment is 32% if you're part of the public plan, so in the end you're paying out of your pocket something higher than the real price of the drug being paid by the pharmacare plan.