Health committee  Yes. I would like to offer a comment here, because I think we're mixing up two things a little bit. One is that we have high-cost drugs and they're not just orphan drugs. Orphan drugs are often high-cost drugs, but that's not particularly the case. Much of what we were worried ab

Health committee  I think one of the things you also have to remember is that the more life-saving, effective or dramatic the improvement of a drug is, the lower the cost per QALY becomes. When you're seeing drugs that are at half a million or a million dollars per quality-adjusted life year, the

Health committee  I don't either, although Mr. Clark has some comments in response to some questions that were provided at the end of last session.

Health committee  Could I also just add to the response?

Health committee  I would remind you that three-quarters of new drugs aren't even going to be in category I, as we estimate, which means that all we're asking for the other three-quarters is that they come in at a median price of countries just like us. Why would Canada have to pay a higher pric

Health committee  Thank you for your interest. See you Friday.

Health committee  I don't really have anything to comment on specifically to the last point, but there was the concern that was earlier addressed that somehow the PMPRB was going to supplant the government drug program negotiations. Of course that's not the case. We're setting a ceiling and they c

Health committee  The reason we don't want to parse things out at the moment is that as things are unfolding, the future of medicine is that everything is essentially going to become a rare disease. We used to think that we'd treat all lung cancer the same way. Now, as we go through the biomolecu

Health committee  Yes, he does.

Health committee  Thank you very much. Good morning. My name is Mitchell Levine. I'm the chairperson of the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board, or PMPRB. I am also a practising physician and assistant dean and professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences and a faculty member of the Centre for