Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, as Members of the Legislative Assembly, it is our responsibility to act as our constituents' advocates, and though we spend most of our time here working on the bigger picture, we recognize that when policies and processes fail, intervention into individual circumstances is necessary. We are our constituents' last resort but when it comes to working with medical travel, increasingly MLAs are becoming Northerners' only option. Medical travel's inadequacies are becoming so severe that it's consuming much of our constituency work, and this is clear the system is not working for our people.
I was hopeful earlier this year when I brought concerns forward of medical travel's inability to provide quality health care to my constituents. This failure has created severe financial burden on working families in my riding, caused them a great deal of stress, and deprived them of access to health care that they need. Initially, the Minister gave me a path forward to rectify the situation. We were asked to work with physicians who initially treated these constituents --
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Okay. We were asked to -- who initially treated these constituents in Alberta to provide updated paperwork which would supposedly ensure a reimbursement would be forthcoming. Unfortunately, the reimbursements health and social services offered amount to far below what the families spent cumulatively on hotels, flights, and meals there.
I was informed later that offering these families any reimbursement at all was an error. The Minister explained that she would only honour these meager reimbursements for one family only because they could not take back -- the department could not take back the assurances they gave the family first while I provided the necessary paperwork. None of the other families I'm working with in my riding will see any reimbursements at all.
Mr. Speaker, I'm dismayed to hear that what the Minister told me in the previous session was a mistake. Upholding the public nature of our health care services is not a mistake. Ensuring patients and their families are not put through additional distress when dealing with life threatening illnesses is not a mistake. Allowing patients who are incapacitated an escort who can understand a plan of care for their loved ones is not a mistake. Northerners want to see us work with them in -- work for them in this Assembly. So what does it say about our health care system when even their MLAs cannot help them? Mr. Speaker, I will have questions for the Minister about how we can fix our broken medical travel system. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Member from Range Lake. Members' statements. Member from Great Slave.
