Tom Beaulieu

Madam Chair, although we feel at the department that there’s some risk to manage in monitoring and auditing what we’re doing, we need to provide comfort with the physicians that are going to work within the system. There seems to be a groundswell of support to go into the midwives. If we just added the midwives this coming fiscal year in Hay River, it would cost us additional money. If we were to move money within our midwives plan, move money around, we could move to hiring midwives. But to clearly understand here that we could run into some serious issues with managing risk, we need to have...

Thank you, Madam Chair. No, we don’t pay anything over and above what services are provided by them, the money that’s provided by them to cover medical costs. They pay us in addition to that an administrative fee to administer that NIHB.

Thank you. Yes, I did misunderstand the question. I thought she was telling me that the physicians were refusing and I said I didn’t know why that was happening. But again, we are looking at that. We think that is one of the emerging issues in the whole issue of chronic disease management, and we recognize that this is an issue and we’re hoping that once the committee is able to discuss this, that changes can be made in the system and it can become part of the insured services. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. We have some progress to report within the last month. I would like the deputy minister just to provide the details of the progress we’ve made in this area.

There was no specific reason for it to be here. The only other option would be to break it out on its own, and if that’s the request of the House, then we would break it out on its own in the next cycle.

We are not aware of any shortfalls anywhere in the third-party billing.

As we examine this possibility, we will work with the Member to look at the costs and so on.

We would be able to provide an inventory of units that are targeted to supported living, but we don’t have that information with us here today.

Thank you, Madam Chair. The way the budget is laid out, if you’re comparing with the actuals, it looks like the budget has decreased, but if you compare with the mains, then you can see that there is a gradual increase. The reason the actuals are high is we have bumped up their budget on the redistribution of funding between all of the health and social services authorities, including Stanton. Some of the authorities that had deficits, we had moved money. We had an agreement with all of the authorities that we would move money around. This was the reason it shows as a bit of a bump up to $87...

Thank you. As Minister I have the authority to add, delete or amend insured services. In May 2012 we had put a committee together with the NWT Medical Association, and now we’re in the process of developing the terms of reference for that so that we can look at making those changes to the medical services through looking at the regulations of the act. Thank you.