Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you to the folks coming in today.
Ms. Mealing, I was just taking a peak in the book here, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research's aging biennial report. If you go to page 8 there's some disturbing news in the report. One of the things is helping seniors stay on their medications safely...new emerging teams. It talks about in 2006 we spent $25 billion on medications, the second largest share of health care expenditures. That says that if you're between the ages of 60 and 79, you have an average of 39 prescriptions per year, and that goes up to 74 as you reach ages 80 and over. If we aren't actually concerned about those numbers, we should be concerned about them.
Mr. Rocan, in your comments on page 9 you talk about health promotion. It seems to me that we're running in two directions in terms of health promotion. Is there a direct relationship to the amount of medication we give people in terms of how we measure promotion of health? We talk about health, up to 70%...90% for diabetes, 50% of strokes are preventable. Are you talking about more preventable because of the drugs that we give them, or more preventable because we encourage them to actually do healthy activities?