Health committee  For Veterans Affairs, I know we do some generic substitution. I'm not sure how much, so I will get back to the committee with that.

Health committee  I can take it for the partners, and others can jump in. It would slow down our ability to make decisions about whether or not drugs should be covered as part of our plans. We'd be into doing six times each, individually, what we're currently doing through CDR. With the partners

Health committee  I can take the first question, but the common drug review people should speak to the provincial matter. I have no knowledge there, and I don't think any of us do. Others can speak to the cancer drugs. On why we got into the common drug review, previously each department tried t

Health committee  That's one that I think we, and perhaps some of the other partners around the table, would need to think about. I know we only have a limited amount of capacity. If CDR were to all of a sudden really speed up, then we'd have to take a decision about trying to put more resources a

Health committee  As I understand it, and I'll verify this for the committee, of the 25 drugs that are recommended not to be listed, Veterans Affairs has not listed any of them. And again “listed” means that they're on the list and they're available for everybody to access without any questions be

Health committee  But I think the information may not be consistent among the departments. I think for Veterans Affairs, they've taken that case-by-case and made it look like we're listed, whereas for the other departments they may have taken the listing.

Health committee  There are questions that have been raised, probably by other partners, around transparency. For us, we're really glad there are a couple of client people sitting on the committee. In terms of other things from the partnership, again, we've been working with the results of the EKO

Health committee  I guess you'd have to talk to other people who are partners in the CDR. From the Federal Healthcare Partnership perspective, it has been four years and it is working well. Part of me would hate to think of all the resources required from the health care system if we were going

Health committee  Sure. Through the Federal Healthcare Partnership, we as federal government departments are actually trying to work together and we try to support and help each other. There are three big players who want to represent themselves, and that's perfect. There are three other smaller p

Health committee  The information in the CARP article is actually wrong, so I'll start from that. In fact, of the 25 drugs that were not recommended to be listed, none of them have been listed by Veterans Affairs Canada. So as I was explaining earlier, the information is actually incorrect. They a

Health committee  Again, Veterans Affairs Canada lists all the ones that are recommended to be listed. We don't list the ones that aren't recommended to be listed. Like others, we have a case-by-case review mechanism.

Health committee  One of the recommendations from the Auditor General was that we should do more on a common formulary. Through the departments, we have identified the common core formulary. Again, each department is going to have different drugs. Birth control is one big thing for us right now,

Health committee  You'll never have one national formulary, but you can have a national core formulary. The cores will be absolutely beneficial.

Health committee  Exactly.

Health committee  From my perspective, I guess the CDR is really looking at bringing new drugs onto the market. It provides us with information on whether or not a particular drug is more cost-effective than anything else out there. If I step back to where we were before 2003, it was taking a lot