Thank you for that fantastic question.
I really think that this is such an important point that we need to spend more time discussing, but just in the short time we have here.... Margie and I actually wrote to the minister when the health accord was being rolled out, about a year and a half or two years ago, with some recommendations on how we can make our health care system better moving forward.
We divided the recommendations into several parts, but the main one was about looking at primary prevention to help people who are healthy to stay well; looking at how we can help people who are at risk by providing them supports, care and wellness in their own communities so that they don't fall into that third category, the ones who are actually sick; and, providing good supports for people with mental and physical illness closer to their homes, within their community of supports and health, but not as much in the hospitals.
I think we need to keep people away from hospitals as much as possible by providing communities of care and support—social, transportation, poverty, all of these social determinants of health—closer to their homes, because that is where the money is being spent at the moment. For every dollar that we put into the health care system, we're only getting about 20 cents at the bottom.