Sandy Lee

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I have two documents to table. The first is the document entitled Supplementary Health Benefits - What We Heard. The second document is the document entitled Slave River Journal Newspaper Article, Supplementary Health Benefits Across Canada, dated May 4, 2010. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, I just need to correct that. I was not in any way suggesting that anybody couldn’t put an input into this unless they wore a title. So if the Member understood it that way, I do apologize. What I meant to say yesterday in answering the question why have you not consulted with the pharmacy association or Nurses’ Association or any other medical related health care professionals, and my answer was yes, we did. We wrote a letter to the pharmacy association. I have actually asked the staff to put that on the website. I have consulted with many people about this supp health plan. My...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I don’t have the number in front of me, but we have a number of staff that run the Supplementary Health Benefits Program. We believe that the new program would cost $200,000 to $300,000 to administer. Thank you.

I’d be happy to share that. We know that policies exist, but it’s the people and machines that implement those policies and procedures. The latest information is that the information was faxed from an Alberta facility and our Privacy Commissioner is in touch with her counterpart to follow up on the details of this. Details are not clear at the moment, but we are following up on that as we take these issues very seriously. Thank you.

One of the reasons why we want to make this change is to bring in those people who are excluded. Yes, the option is there to bring them in without making any changes to anything else. Then we have to put in extra money. We believe it will cost two to three million dollars to bring them back in. But the thing is, as the Member for Hay River South mentioned already, the health care budget has been going up at about 8 to 10 percent every year even if we change nothing. The cost of delivering, the cost of human resources, the cost of health care is going up by 8 percent. Our budget has doubled but...

Thank you. The proposal that we have, that’s under discussion and we will continue to have that discussion to hear out what the Members have to say. This policy has a suggestion for a cap, and also we are working on a catastrophic drug coverage and other programs, Mr. Speaker. Thank you.

Because, Mr. Speaker, this is the non-insured program and the non-insured program is not where everybody gets service, regardless of their ability to pay. That’s insured service. Mr. Speaker, we are looking at including people who are excluded and asking those on top of the income threshold to make a contribution.

Mr. Speaker, the Member is concerned about high cost of drug expenditures and we know that there are some outliers and there are some people on the border that will be hard hit. So we are working on and those things are addressed by a cap. So that’s something that we need to address...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I did hear about the situation that the Member is describing and we are investigating that. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As the Member is aware, when we went to public consultation on this in April we just wanted to talk about the idea of it. Then people asked for specific options for income threshold and we offered $30,000 threshold to start and then $50,000. Assuming that the income threshold is at $50,000 for single and moving up progressively, we believe that this program will still provide 80 percent of the people a very good coverage of extended health. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Member is right; there is a provision there that would allow me to go back to the Cabinet for revision. We heard and analyzed and reviewed the feedback that we got from the public, and based on the analysis we had, we did not conclude that we had to go back to Cabinet for revision, but we did go to the Cabinet with options on what we have heard. Thank you.