Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The Minister again talked about working with departments and authorities. Earlier in talking to him, Ms. Lee said that they had been working together for 14 months on this issue. Again, you're talking to the people who rely on the department all of their funding. How are they going to talk about whether or not we should, for instance, remove the specified disease list as part of the criteria for the extended health benefits? They are going to depend on this government to come up with the funding before they can answer whether or not that should be done. It's exactly the same thing with the co-payment of medical travel. It should be the legislators that are involved in this policy discussion, because we're the ones who have to come up with the money. So let's not obfuscate the issue by saying that we're going to deal with the authorities to try to solve it. It has to be those of us who sit around this table that make the decisions about how and where the money is going to be spent. I've made it perfectly clear to the Minister that if it means that the people who cannot afford to pay the $250 co-payment get assistance from this government, if the cost of that is that $1 million to this government from the federal government, well, then we're going to have to maybe bite that bullet. Because we can't say that only some people, a small class of people, because there are just a limited number of people out there who are not covered by an insurance program that we collect this from. But that small group of people typically work for low wages, have no insurance, and wind up having to subsidize this program for the rest of the people. It doesn't cost a lot of people money because they're covered through an insurance program. But it isn't fair the way this program has worked out now, since we've put in that $250 co-payment. It's not productive to keep saying we have to deal with the authorities, and the department has been working on this. This is an issue that we're going to have either decide that we bite the bullet or we don't.

And it's the same thing with whether you look at a continuous program or a broad program. If you want to have a program that is seamless and broad, it's still going to cost the government money or else we're going to be reducing benefits across the table. That isn't a discussion that you're going to have to have with authorities. If you're talking about reducing benefits, that's something, again, we have to have around this table, because it's legislators who are going to hear the complaints from their constituents, as the elected officials who are going to have to deal with those complaints. People who are appointed to authorities don't have the same responsibility to the people in their service areas that we do. We have a responsibility and, therefore, we have to be accountable to the public for decisions that either increase or decrease the level of service. This is where the discussion needs to take place, but it has to be one that's very quickly past the concept stage. There's not much point of having an options paper if there is no money at the table. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.