Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I wanted to ask the Minister of Health and Social Services how much it costs her department to provide the supplementary health benefits to residents in the North.
Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. The honourable Minister responsible for Health and Social Services, Ms. Lee.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I believe I’ll have to get back to the Member on that. I believe it’s about $8 million, but we often ask for about $3 million for supp health.
I’ll look forward to the Minister’s answer in terms of an exact figure. If it’s around seven or eight million, I want to ask the Minister about the supplementary health benefits that we do provide for our people in the North. What’s the percentage of increase every year of this special program?
I believe the incremental increase for that budget has been somewhere between 6 to 8 percent over the last number of years. Thank you.
Okay, so that looks like we’ve got a couple of million every year to support this program and to support the benefits of this program for people in the North. I want to ask the Minister about the sustainability of this program on a yearly basis in regard to some of the needs in the smaller communities and some of the basic access to health care. It seems like we’re going through crunching time. How much can we sustain and continue on with this program? Can the Minister answer that?
Thank you. Sustainability is a question on all health care programs, including the Supp Health Benefits Program, and this is why I believe that the recommendations made by the Supp Health Benefits Joint Working Group is timely, because it’s tasked us to find ways to encourage people to get third-party insurance.
Mr. Speaker, as I have stated many a time in the House, this is one of the few government programs where some people can get the assistance elsewhere, and we need to encourage that. So a part of our work is to encourage employers to offer health care benefits and then individuals to take on private insurance where they can, also to extend retirement health care benefits when they retire. So there are many parts to the instructions we got from the Joint Working Group and this is why we need to do that in the name of sustainability going forward. Thank you.
Thank you, Ms. Lee. Your final, short supplementary, Mr. Yakeleya.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Can the Minister advise this House as to the type of dollars that they will be required to provide to the lower income families without any health coverage? The department surely must have done some assessment as to what it’s going to cost this government to provide coverage for the people that don’t have coverage as we speak today.
The working poor and the excluded coverage that the Member is talking about, we are talking about those who don’t have dental or vision care coverage, because they would get health care and drug coverage and such from the regular health care coverage we have. At this time we could only guess how many numbers there are. We believe there are about 2,000 people in the Territories without employer coverage that gives them dental and vision care. We cover $1,000 for seniors for dental and $250 for glasses every two years. So that’s the cost we’d be looking at if we were to cover them immediately.
Thank you, Ms. Lee. The honourable Member for Nahendeh, Mr. Menicoche.
