Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Further to my Member's statement about the ministerial travel policy, I have questions for the Minister of Health and Social Services. The $80,000 threshold for medical travel that I spoke about earlier does not take into account how many people in the household that $80,000 is supporting, if there is an ongoing medical condition that requires frequent trips out of town, and the fact that it essentially punishes citizens for living outside Yellowknife where most of these services are offered. I am no socialist, but I do not think that costs should get in the way of people in Hay River receiving the same medical care as people in Yellowknife. I would like to ask the Minister: what is the rationale for this $80,000 threshold? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Masi. Minister of Health and Social Services.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I do not know what the rationale for the $80,000 co-payment is or, rather, the level of the $80,000 co-payment. I know that my predecessor once referred to it as an arbitrary number. Clearly, we need to review the use of co-payment and the amount of the co-payment. That work is currently being done as part of the medical travel review, where we are reviewing a number of aspects of the medical travel policy, including the co-payment. We want to take into consideration not just the family income, but the size of the family; the illness that the individual might be suffering from; and the fact that some individuals, when they are ill, may not be able to earn, and looking at last year's tax return might be the complete wrong thing to do.
These are the types of things that we are doing. We are hoping to have this work done late in this calendar year so we can present to committee early in the next calendar year so that we can make important changes to medical travel to benefit all residents in the Northwest Territories and to make sure that they can get to the treatment they need when they need it. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
It seems like I am late to the game and the Minister is already on top of this, but I have been hearing about the medical travel review for quite a while now, and it always seems like something bumps it. Can the Minister commit that this review is going to be completed when he says it is going to be and that I can tell my constituents that they do not need to worry about these arbitrary numbers anymore?
The review of medical travel actually started in the last Assembly. There was a significant amount of public consultation that was done. The department went out and sought information from users of the system from across the Northwest Territories. A lot of data was gathered.
A number of things have happened. We have put in an appeal process, I personally think it still needs a little bit of tweaking, and we have put out a handbook to help people understand and navigate the system, but clearly, more needs to be done. The area the Member is talking about is certainly one of the areas in which we need to make more progress, as is looking at the rates that we provide for individuals who are on medical travel for ground transportation and for per diems for accommodation.
I have made a commitment already that that work will get done. My intention is to have that work done late in this calendar year so that we can make presentation to committee early next calendar year so that we can bring the changes into effect April 1, 2018.
I had a bunch of pointed questions, but the Minister is actually doing this work already, so he is off the hook. How about this, though? Because this is a ministerial policy, I assume you can change it with a stroke of a pen. How about at least adjusting that $80,000 threshold for inflation? For the next few months until this is in place, people could get the care they need and it would not be an economic hardship. This is not an academic exercise. I have people in my constituency who bring this up to me for whom this is a real issue, and it affects them every single month. Would the Minister be willing to do that?
I appreciate that the Member thinks that this is easy and it can be done with the stroke of a pen, but if we are going to make a change on some financial levels, we need to understand the implications of those. We need to understand why. I will say that in cases of undue hardship, where a family is experiencing some significant difficulty, we are willing to look at these on a oneoff, oneonone basis to make sure that we are not really disadvantaging families where there is undue hardship.
Masi. Oral questions. Member for Yellowknife Centre.
