Health committee  Sure. We did look at the Emergencies Act very early on in COVID to understand how it works and whether or not it could be triggered, so let me give you an overview. The Emergencies Act, unlike provincial emergency legislation, can only be triggered in relatively rare circumstanc

Health committee  Thanks very much. Six minutes is not really too much time to talk about how COVID has irrevocably changed our world. I know you all are working so hard to try to unpack all of that, and I want to thank you for the work you're doing, first of all. I want to make two points. The

Health committee  I'm sorry about that.

Health committee  Okay. Smaller provinces have aimed for zero COVID and attempted to eliminate community transmission and quickly manage any new outbreaks. This has involved tightly managing their respective borders to prevent new infections entering their safe or green zones. If we look cross-

Health committee  Well, I'm here in the top of the South Island, which is not too far from a little city called Nelson. Normally the weather is glorious, but it's actually pouring rain, so bummer. It's my son's ninth birthday today, so bummer again, because we were meant to be going to Laser Tec.

Health committee  That's just gross. That's a back-of-an-envelope thing that a few health economists and physicians and folks who have been talking about public medicare have come up with that they think could cover 150 essential medications. It doesn't include whatever you may be able to extract

Health committee  Right, and provincial health insurers, I would say, haven't done a very good job on it anyway, so it's not as though we have this perfect nirvana that we're about to wreck in terms of better control of what physicians are doing. I think that expanding coverage to include very vul

Health committee  If provinces wished to do so, in my view they could negotiate a lot harder than they do with pharmaceutical companies to extract better benefits, but it does help if you have a universal plan that everybody's part of so that you're not shifting the cost from from public to privat

Health committee  Yes, different provinces have different approaches, and that's part of the problem. Across the country we have a wide variety of approaches, and it does depend on where you live. For example, British Columbia does insure everybody, but it has a 30% copayment for pretty much every

Health committee  We have been waiting for 52 years for incrementalism to work. That's quite a long time. That's older than I am.

Health committee  I don't think some of it would actually be that tough. I gave you one example. I don't think correcting my bunion is as important as insulin; do you?

Health committee  Right. I think that if we ask provincial governments to have a fair trade-off among hospital services, physician services, and drugs, we would see a better range of care that is covered for everybody. Some things may fall off that list, but I think that in places around the wor

Health committee  What happens is that the money that is saved by better negotiation of pharmaceutical prices is used to help other things. We've already talked about evidence that people who aren't able to access their drugs are in emergency rooms and are crowding up emergency wards. We need to f

Health committee  In the Canada Health Act, you could say a list of essential medicines would need to be determined by each province, and those essential medicines would be free at point of access, similar to what is currently a basic requirement of the Canada Health Act, so that there would be no

Health committee  I agree with that. I think we should. It has to be clear that it doesn't mean everything is covered. I think it means that some things that are presently covered may not be covered if we have to expand to afford that. I think that's the quid pro quo, and that has to be clear to C