Health committee  Can I quickly comment? I think this committee also heard from the CEO of the Surrey Board of Trade, a board of trade in my province that brought up to our provincial chamber of commerce a motion in favour of a universal public pharmacare plan, which was passed. One of the arg

Health committee  The principles of the Canada Health Act, particularly as they relate to accessibility, actually forbid there being extra billing or user charges of any kind for what are called “insured services under the act”. The insured services, if you were to add pharmaceuticals, would have

Health committee  Very briefly, I just want to add that both in the “Pharmacare 2020” report and in another report by our national research network called “A Better Prescription”, just published last year, we articulate how the appropriate use of medicines is one of the key pillars of a national p

Health committee  I'm aware of a couple of surveys of employers that say they are very interested in a national public drug plan of some kind because they are finding themselves under great pressure. I think you heard testimony from representatives of the employers in Canada who basically argue t

Health committee  Roughly speaking, yes, in the sense that the World Health Organization manages what it calls the model essential medicines list for the world. That's the list it believes constitutes the drugs that every human being on earth has a fundamental right to access. That's the starting

Health committee  Based on the paper published earlier this year—and I would have to look at the precise figures—we estimated the incremental cost to government to develop a national plan to essentially provide all of these drugs was about $1 billion more than we're currently paying through public

Health committee  Yes, it used an extraordinarily open formulary in the context of Canadian public drug plans. It had conservative assumptions about price savings, when even our analysis vis-à-vis the U.S. veterans administration right here in North America, right south of the border, shows that t

Health committee  Yes. Almost without doubt, the provinces will either have to cede authority in some way—and some lawyers and health lawyers have looked into this—or we're going to need to sit down and negotiate. This is consistent with Canada's framework for national health and social programs,

Health committee  Yes.

Health committee  I think we already have the institutional capacity to do an excellent job of running a drug plan. Let's face it: our provinces already do a lot of work on this, and we have world-renowned experts and agencies like CADTH. We now have really good capacity within the pCPA to do pric

Health committee  Yes. I guess the PBO report is only the latest.

Health committee  I think one of the flaws of the Quebec model was that it was based on an insurance industry's model of what prescription benefits are, rather than an integrated model of a health benefit that includes prescription drugs. Systems around the world that integrate medicines into the

Health committee  You have to find it. You can't necessarily immediately grab it, for instance, out of the extended health insurance from which public sector employees currently benefit. Eventually, that will become a savings both to those employees and their employers, but in the short run, to in

Health committee  I can quickly answer that. I'm not entirely sure about going into the Canada Health Act, which is what Roy Romanow recommended for prescription drugs as a long-term goal. There are certain principles of the Canada Health Act that might not be consistent with the way you manage a

Health committee  It is fair to say that all the countries with effective systems for managing cost and access so that there's equity of access with cost control use some form of a national formulary.