Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the member for his comments. I am aware he is a chiropractor by trade so I can understand his interest in expanding the health care envelope.
As members may know I am hearing impaired. I discovered that in my province audiologists had to come under the auspices of doctors, which is totally ludicrous in my mind. I always went to audiologists because they did a good job, they provided a good service, and I could not be bothered with the waiting lists that doctors had. This is the clout that the CMA has in this country and, quite frankly, someone has to take them on. The ones that have taken them on, unfortunately, are the provinces. When they do not want to take them on, they send the bill up here and we are supposed to just write a cheque. That creates profound problems.
We have hospital administrators in this country that are paid $250,000 a year. They switch jobs, take buyout packages and start again at $250,000. These are all huge costs to our health care system.
The member talked about choices in delivering health care as opposing to delivering financial benefits to a few people. We must deal with that.
The member talked about the infamous gun registry system. Let me first say to members opposite that the reality is that money has not disappeared. People want to call it a boondoggle. The fact of the matter is these were costs that were involved in implementing the system. No one has walked home with bags of money in his or her pocket. It has been spent on lawyers, advertising, and so on. The technical requirements were also put into the system. The money has not disappeared.
If we get into the question about choice and whether this is a rational allocation of expenditures, sure, we all have questions about that. I think that is fair enough. The Auditor General has done a great job in ringing some of the alarms. I have some suggestions as to how to correct that too.
Getting back to the allocation of resources, we should not be spending any more money on health care. I believe there are tons of money in the health care system now. We must sit down and find ways to extract the efficiency out of that system. That is why for me Romanow disappoints. He has a lot of positive ideas that we should move ahead with, but we cannot build on a system that is currently dysfunctional in my mind.