Perhaps I can provide a bit of perspective.

I think we heard in the opening statement from the Department of Health that some drugs can be extremely expensive for individuals. If you look at the opening statement from Veterans Affairs they commented on the fact that in 2015-16 they covered 48,000 veterans at a cost of $91.6 million. It's a very small program in terms of the overall coverage of prescription drugs. When we did the audit in 2014-15 they were covering 51,000, so the number of veterans they were paying for has decreased from 51,000 to 48,000, a decrease of 3,000, but the costs have gone from $80 million to $91.6 million.

A lot of that, as we have seen, has been the increase in the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes. Nevertheless, if you pull that out I think you can see that the incremental inflationary cost of prescription drugs can often be much higher than just normal inflation. Again, if you look at 2014-15 at the information we have in the audit, again, the average cost per person to Veterans Affairs was almost $1,600. The numbers we heard from Health Canada would probably put their average somewhere around $800 or something like that per individual. I may be wrong on that. That was my quick math.

When you take that number and multiply it by the number of people who would be covered you get a very large number. Some offsets to that would have to be figured in. What are the other programs that would no longer have to exist, what are they paying for, and where are they getting their money? Understanding the costs of this type of program and the offset costs that could go toward it would be prudent, as well as understanding the cost pressures.

I think in the audit that we have here that's something we said is very important in these types of programs: being able to monitor those cost pressures and being able to put in place cost-effectiveness strategies. Also, these would be strategies to know up front how the program is going to react when a new, expensive drug comes on the market and there's a lot of demand.

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