Thank you, Madam Speaker. Madam Speaker, health system researchers identify two potential ways to reduce health system costs prevention through public health education and ensuring people take their medication. When I was a university student, our high school English teacher and his wife were sent to Edmonton where their baby was born premature. I went up to U of A Hospital where they sat teary eyed waiting for their tiny baby to finish her first surgery. Their baby Katie survived her surgery, persevered through childhood, set territorial records at this year's Canada Summer Games, and is now a third year university science student with a 3.95 GPA. Today, Katie is the NWT's only resident with cystic fibrosis.
Katie, who's sights are set on speech pathology, is deciding where to accept a job offer on graduation. But the cost of her medication plays a key role in deciding where to call home. Katie takes two medications a nationally publiclyfunded Trikafta at $300,000 per year and a second one that the GNWT helps support at $12,000 per year. If proposed changes to the specified disease program move forward, Katie will no longer receive GNWT support for her medication. Ironically, half of the Canadian provinces, also desperate for speech pathologists, will cover Katie's second medication.
Madam Speaker, Katie's story is one of many. I also serve single parents who exceed the income threshold but live on the poverty line with the North's high cost of living. NWT residents who sit above the income threshold but whose medications would cost roughly $20,000 a year, and others who would choose more opportunities for family and reduce medications for themselves.
The income threshold chosen by the GNWT are below liveable wages, and liveable wages do not account for high costs of life saving medications. Beyond the strain this will put on northern residents, this also stands to further strain our healthcare system.
With this change, many Northerners will join other Canadians who face decisions to not fill their prescriptions, take smaller doses than ordered, or cut back on food, heat, and family expenses to try to cover drug costs that, for some, will be suffocating, and mismanaging medications ultimately drives up hospitalization.
Hospitals now dominate all healthcare systems in high income countries. Canadian annual hospital care is roughly $77 billion. The average hospital stay in the NWT is almost twice the national average at just over, ironically, $12,000. Madam Speaker, I seek unanimous consent to conclude my statement for the first time this sitting.
Unanimous consent granted
Very big thank you, colleagues. Madam Speaker, this is not a wholeofsystem thinking policy change. This is a quick fix that looks at one budgetary line item in a vacuum with potentially harmful impacts to the health of other Northerners and the health of the system's collective bottom line. I urge this government to reconsider. They do not have a grasp on how many people will no longer qualify for support and, ultimately, what the cost will be to the system. Thank you, Madam Speaker.
Thank you, Member. Members' statements. Member for Nahendeh.
