Mr. Speaker, my questions today are for the Minister of Health and Social Services. Numerous other Members have asked questions today about the supplementary health benefits and the proposed changes to those. Part of the big issue that I’m having with this is the analytical work, the work that somebody inside of the Department of Health and Social Services is, and should be, conducting on this. I don’t know how the Minister and the government could go public with a policy as half-baked and disjointed as this policy is. The Minister announced it in December and here we are the first week of February, I’ve probably got 500 e-mails, the Minister has got a number of e-mails and calls and concerns. Obviously, the policy itself is flawed. I’d like to ask the Minister today: who exactly is doing the work on this program and this policy change inside the department? How many people have been working on this thing? Obviously, somewhere along the line people are messing this thing up in a big way, Mr. Speaker. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Ramsay. The honourable Minister of Health and Social Services, Ms. Lee.
Mr. Speaker, the policy section of the Department of Health and Social Services were responsible for designing and doing consultations between 2003 to 2007 on the implementation of the policy with the health insurance office in Inuvik and we have obtained Blue Cross, who is the provider of insurance programs for the government to implement this plan.
Mr. Speaker, there are only 42,000 residents here in the Northwest Territories and I find it completely absurd that the Minister cannot answer a question about how many people this will impact. She talks about low-income earners and families. How many of those people are there in our Territory and where are they? She can’t answer that question.
Also, I haven’t heard the Minister give us an answer as to her assertion that this move is cost neutral. Where is that evidence, Mr. Speaker? I’d like to see it, and so would everybody else. It just hasn’t been proven.
Mr. Speaker, it’s hard to explain all this. The Health Care Program is a demand-driven service. I can’t tell you, as the Minister of Health, who is exactly on the system on any given day. Let’s just be logical. How many people are in the hospital? Well, I guess we could do that. We could do it today, take an inventory, but there are lots of people accessing this program and for all kinds of different reasons with all kinds of family make-ups and stuff.
What I want to say is, as the Minister, what you look at is the policy intent and policy objective, and cost neutral does not mean that we have $5 million for supplementary health and we cannot spend one cent more. That’s not how we operate supplementary health programs because the Member knows that for as long as this program has been around, we’ve been spending about $7 million over the last number of years and we have to come back for a supplementary appropriation if it goes over. The government sets out policy objectives and what it says is that until now we have provided supplementary health benefits to those who are over 60, 100 percent. If you have a specific condition on the list, it’s 100 percent. If you are indigent, 100 percent. We had no means to include income as a criteria, so the government has the right to say, okay, let us include an ability to pay or an inability to pay as a policy factor. Then once you set that out, whoever meets that criteria gets on that system and we pay for it. But since we announced that, I acknowledge that we are leaving out more people than we should. So I’m willing to change that. The catastrophic cost policy, the ceiling is too high. We are leaving out too many people. We don’t want to do that because people have asked us to do that, so we are changing that. We are being responsive to make sure that we meet the policy objectives and we are helping our residents who need it.
Mr. Speaker, again, I do find it hard to believe that we don’t know and we can’t guess. Maybe now that we’re looking at income testing, I think there are other ways we can model this. We can find out -- and I agree with the Minister -- if low-income earners and low-income families are the area that we need to address as a government, we should be doing that. We should find out how many people there are in that segment and find out what it costs. That’s what we’re asking for here.
While I’m talking about cost, I want to ask the Minister what work is the Department of Health and Social Services doing on chasing down the 3,000 to 4,000 renegade health care cards that are out there costing us money? Nothing, Mr. Speaker. That’s the answer to that one.
Mr. Speaker, I can categorically tell the Member that he is wrong when he says nothing is being done about tracking down those people with NWT health care cards when they should not...We have implemented an audit program. The audit office of the GNWT has been sending letters...We’ve been doing auditing of all of the claims that we are receiving on NWT health care and if there are too many services being rendered outside of the provinces, we’re writing them and we’re asking them to document them and if they don’t give us the documents we call them and we are tracking them down. We have been auditing this is in a very serious way. The Member is very wrong in saying that nothing is being done because we took that issue very seriously.
Thank you Ms. Lee. Final supplementary, Mr. Ramsay.
Mr. Speaker, I know the Minister has just announced this new work that the department is working on on the renegade health care card issue. That’s news to me. Also news to me lately is the announcement that we’re losing our chief medical officer and that the government had signed a physicians’ contract. They don’t tell us, we find out in the press. That’s the way this government operates, Mr. Speaker. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Ramsay. I didn’t hear a question there. Ms. Lee, did you want to respond?
Mr. Speaker, the Member could go back on the record. I have announced the audit program that we are doing to keep track of health records. The medical health officer, he made a personal choice to go work in Alberta. He was going to communicate to the Members himself, but Alberta decided to announce it two weeks before so that’s why the Member didn’t know. With respect to the physicians’ contract, we communicated to every Member, we wrote them a letter way before it was announced in the media. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Ms. Lee. The honourable Member for Yellowknife Centre, Mr. Hawkins.
