Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions are for the Minister of Health and Social Services. I believe the department will work to create, you know, a number of information items on each of the specified health conditions and work with those people to get the answers they're seeking moving forward. But I think as legislators, there's some fundamental questions about, you know, whether this is a good idea in the first place. And I think one of those is costs.
So my first question for the Minister of health is how much are we currently spending on providing extended health benefits to those with specified health conditions? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Member for Yellowknife North. Minister responsible for Health and Social Services.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, the Department of Health and Social Services is working to make the extended health benefits more equitable. And we put out a number of products here, a discussion paper at FAQ, and a plain language summary, which talks about the supplementary health benefits for low income people, and a drug program for catastrophic costs. The amount of money we're spending right now on this, the 54 specified disease conditions, is $4.3 million, and that's for 1,514 individuals. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. And I guess the next question is do we know I'm actually somewhat unsure whether this is going to save us money or cost us more money, the switch from a specified list to a means tested model. Do we know how much this current proposal will cost us or save us, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you. We're in the information gathering phase, and I'm gratified to say we've been getting a lot of feedback. So we don't have a specific model that we can apply costing to. But given the fact that we're going to include more benefits for more people, we expect the program to cost more. Thank you.
Yeah, thank you, Mr. Speaker. And, yeah, I guess we're going to have find out some data there because I imagine providing prescription costs to people who already have specified diseases is more costly than, you know, just because you are a low income earner doesn't mean you get any prescriptions at all. We might bring thousands of people in who barely use the benefits. So I get there's some work to costing this. But to me the department is kind of completely gone out and engaged on, to me, what are separate questions. One, do we want to provide a means tested program; and two, do we want to get rid of the specified health. I don't know that we should be framing that as binary. And I guess my question to the Minister is why can't we keep both, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. And I appreciate the question. I don't see it as a binary situation here. The specified conditions' list covers 54 diseases. If you have ALS, as one example, you're not on that list. You're not getting any help from the government of the NWT. So the starting point was to make the program more equitable for people who not only have drug costs for chronic conditions but they also don't have any drug coverage at all. So that means for the most basic things like antibiotics. So the thing about this is that people and their conditions don't fit into these little silos very easily. So what we're trying to do here is ask the people who have the means to help pay for their own coverage and to support the people who don't have the means to get the coverage they need to live their best lives. Thank you.
Thank you, Minister. Final supplementary, Member for Yellowknife North.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. You know, my hope is that we could find a way to work with each of those people on the specified health condition list. I know there are some very expensive drugs, and there are some people with some very unique circumstances. And we may have to keep some of the conditions. Also I know we may have to revisit the list. There's some confusion to me why cancer's on there if it's insured; what it actually is accomplishing by being on there.
But my other question is the federal government recently announced a federal dental care plan. It was means tested. And I believe there is announcement in the work at the federal level to announce a federal pharma care plan. I imagine it'll be means tested as well. I'm just wondering if the Minister has any insight from her federal colleagues about any news in that area or how that would affect our current plans moving forward. It may make a lot of what we're trying to do moot, Mr. Speaker. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, first of all, the Member has raised this issue about cancer drugs, and I want to give him a specific answer to this. If somebody has cancer and they're receiving treatment in a hospital, those drugs are provided to the person without any means testing or any charge. If after the cancer treatment there is a prescription that is preventative, like tamoxifen for breast cancer, then that is part of the specified condition list, and it would be captured in this new program. So, again, in response to his points, there is there is consideration for a drug benefit plan that would cover catastrophic medical costs. For example, the most current treatment for cystic fibrosis is $300,000 per year per client, which is obviously a very huge amount of money for anyone to undertake.
So in terms of the federal government, we don't have any additional information about when pharma care is going to happen. There was a report given to the federal government on the pharma care program prior to the 2019 election, and we delayed the review of the supplementary health benefits program to wait for more information to come forward on pharma care national pharma care. It hasn't come forward. So we've decided that we need to move forward with our own review. Thank you.
Thank you, Minister. Oral questions. Member for Monfwi.
