Very good.
Doctor, is it pronounced “benzodiazepine”—did I get it? Am I close?
We're getting there General, we're getting there.
All joking aside though, I wanted to complement Madame Mendès on her comments. I was having the same feeling, that we're starting to walk down a moralistic road in terms of evaluation, rather than a medical one.
Dammit, if that's what soldiers need when they come back after defending this country and they're in those kinds of war zones.... Nobody was being overly moralistic when we sent them over there; nobody was being overly moralistic with their families when there was the potential that they may not even come home alive.
Dammit, if this helps them, then it needs to be there. Nobody's talking like this about the cost of cancer drugs. We have to talk about them in terms of containing the cost, but not about whether or not morally we think such and such is an appropriate medicine to be giving to a fellow Canadian citizen who put on that uniform and went off into that war zone and got broken and came back and believed that the commitment this country made to them would be honoured.
I'm so glad you went down that road. I appreciate it and I support 100% what you said.
Having said that, though, we have an obligation involving our approach to drugs. I want to bring us back to the Auditor General's report, page 10, paragraph 4.42:
We found, however, that over the following two years Department officials did not pursue Product Listing Agreements with pharmaceutical companies. We also found that not using them has limited what it can include on its drug benefits list because the costs of some drugs are too high.
When I look at the action plan, on page 2 I see under “Cost Effectiveness Strategies”:
Continue working with other federal drug partners and the Pan Canadian Pharmaceutical Alliance to explore opportunities to enter into Product Listing Agreements
What's the problem?
I would have thought the response to the recommendation would be that yes, we've done it, or it's on the brink of being done, or we're negotiating the actual final details.
Why is it so difficult to get into this agreement?