Professor Michael McMahon:

As I said, that is even before this moratorium is lifted. We were just talking about this outside. The overruns look as though they may be slightly accelerating. It may be the moratorium or it may be something else that is causing it to accelerate further and, if that is the case, our estimates would be an underestimate.

One might want to say we are overshooting, and in that case, one would be able to say that we might get health spending right back on track for the last seven months of the year. However, that has not been indicated through history. In fact, history has always shown that the overruns tended to expose themselves in the second half of the year and we have seen really significant ones already. However, these are estimates.

As I said before this committee before, I am not a health expert so I do not know the precise way in which one should budget and negotiate on the health side or about the right thing to do from a health perspective. Yet, from a macro perspective, let me tell the committee about why we should not do this process of underbudgeting and then expect for the money to be suddenly made available towards the end of the year. Shocks can occur during the year.