Health committee  As I said on Monday, no two regimes are alike. Canada, to my knowledge, is the only developed country with a price regulator that regulates pharmaceuticals. The comparison kind of breaks down when you have that information. There certainly are other developed countries where the

Health committee  No. The November 2019 draft that we initially consulted on had a $60,000 cost-per-QALY maximum. However, following the extensive consultations that we had with our stakeholders over the course of the ensuing three or four months, we opted to raise that threshold to $200,000 per Q

Health committee  Yes, probably. That's the phenomenon that Dr. Levine was talking about on Monday. We're just getting more and more of those types of drugs that are extremely high-cost. They can be north of $500,000 per QALY, $1 million per QALY, but that's the entire point of having health techn

Health committee  I think it's a fair question, and maybe one that would be better directed to CADTH or INESSS, because that's precisely the type of work they do, along with HTA bodies across the world. They figure out how much we can afford to pay for a quality-adjusted life year. That's the natu

Health committee  Yes. There are a number of independent patient organizations that don't accept any funding from outside sources, from industry, and they submitted briefs to the committee. One is Breast Cancer Action Montreal or Quebec. The other one is Independent Voices for Safe and Effective D

Health committee  Off the top of my head, I'm not sure what submissions they're referring to. I can tell you that we did make substantive revisions, major revisions between the November and June drafts, and I think those revisions have been instrumental in getting some of our stakeholders to sign

Health committee  To respond to the first part of your statement, that's absolutely correct. There are criteria in the Patent Act enumerated there, and then there are additional criteria now having been added in by way of regulation by the Minister of Health. In terms of the actual calculation, w

Health committee  I do not.

Health committee  We actually submitted those in writing in both official languages a few hours ago. I thought they would be distributed to members by now. Is that the case?

Health committee  It's actually not $15 million; it's $12 million. It's based on real revenue as reported to us by the patentee. They're required to report that revenue to us, so it will be pretty easy to monitor. About 50% or so of high-cost rare-disease drugs that come to the Canadian market wou

Health committee  If memory serves, it was based on a methodology used by a sister organization in the U.S., called ICER, where you basically look at how much we're spending on pharmaceuticals in a given year, how much GDP is increasing, the percentage of GDP increase, and multiply the percentage

Health committee  Sure.

Health committee  As I said, about 50% or less of high-cost rare-disease drugs that are coming onto the market would meet that threshold. However, it's important to bear in mind that even when that threshold kicks in, for the time being, the new, lower-price ceiling won't be applied by us. As I me

Health committee  Thank you very much for your interest.

Health committee  That's our operating presumption. I know a lot of people feel strongly that there is a link between price and access. I would point out that notwithstanding the fact that Canada currently pays the third-or fourth-highest prices in the world, we are roughly 13th or 14th in terms o