Health committee  That's right. The difference would be those who are maybe on seniors programs in the various provinces or on some of the other provincial support programs.

Health committee  That's correct. The price of the medication is a pass-through from the insurer straight to the employer and straight to premium. Any reduction in cost, any reduction in price would pass through to the employer who is the plan sponsor, or those who have individual coverage would s

Health committee  There's no question. They're either very satisfied or satisfied. It's up in the 85% range.

Health committee  There's no question that they will. Premiums are a function of the expected cost that we will be outlaying on behalf of an insured individual. If those costs decline, anything we can do to bring those down will have a positive impact on premiums in the extent of reducing them.

Health committee  We have to base our estimates off what the PMPRB's estimates are. The savings to employers would be somewhere around 10% of what's spent currently, which is a significant amount of money. It would be in the billions of dollars, over time, that we would expect to be passed through

Health committee  Thank you for the question. I'll make a couple of points. Drug costs are borne by the employer, so any savings on the price of the medications will flow directly through to the employer and ultimately to the employee. It's sort of a pass-through cost, from our perspective. The s

Health committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for giving us the opportunity to speak with you today. Thank you for inviting me to talk to you today as part of your study on Patented Medicine Prices Review Board's guidelines. The Canadian Life and Health Insurance Associati

Health committee  No, and I think this goes back to my comment earlier about administrative costs. We don't sell drug coverage. We have a sales force, an executive team, back office people, and they are supporting a whole suite of things. To give you an analogy, if Canadian Tire stopped selling a

Health committee  We're waiting for an invitation—

Health committee  I think people are sort of dancing around using the term that you're going to have to raise taxes to pay for the $9 billion. There's a transition that's important to consider, and this is one of the reasons I would say the PBO is very, very optimistic. They do reference that in t

Health committee  Look, we can get those savings without having to reorganize the whole system, without having to incur those costs, and we have outlined what we think makes a lot of sense today.

Health committee  Do you want to know by drug or by category?

Health committee  One of the reasons people value their private insurance coverage so highly is that we focus on wellness, which is now the biggest trend and driver in a lot of employment plans. Pilots studies on better treatment of diabetes, better treatment of hypertension, better treatment of m

Health committee  If the model is a first-dollar-paid public plan, then I suppose the role for private insurers essentially disappears. You'd have to define the model you're proposing a little more clearly for me. There have been some interesting discussions around a national formulary based on

Health committee  Absolutely. Employers are going to presumably continue to want to offer health benefits to their employees. In every province where we operate in Canada, our business is slightly different. Every public program is different in every province. We adapt to that. We supplement wha