Madam Speaker, the Prime Minister has been a member of Parliament for 32 years. He does not need lessons on medicare from the Reform Party. Let us make that perfectly clear. He was here when medicare was brought forward. He saw the growth and the best of medicare. That is why he is such a staunch defender of it. That is what we are talking about.
The member for Macleod talks about core or medically necessary services and having lists. Certainly they are things that have been talked about. The premier of Alberta talks about them all the time and he has not been able to come up with a list.
I would understand if the member for Macleod would agree. After all, he is and was at another time in his life a physician. Does he not believe it is far better for physicians, medical practitioners, to make that determination when they have someone before them? They look at the evidence before them and know what is medically necessary or not, or they should know.
With the help of the Medical Research Council and many other agencies we are proposing to look at evidence based outcomes. Many procedures have been performed that perhaps do not have any real value. Those kinds of procedures should not be performed any more. We need to do a lot more research in that field. A lot of it is being done and we will continue to do it. We are proposing clinical guidelines so that there are fairly uniform ways of determining.
When we hear about an excessively high rate of hysterectomies in one area versus another area when the composition of the communities is essentially the same, there is something wrong. We will work at addressing some very serious discrepancies, but that is not to say that we should have a strictly defined list. I still believe that patients, along with their physicians and their caregivers, should be the ones to determine what is medically necessary.