Sandy Lee

Enhancing home care service and community support is one of the goals of the department. We appreciate that extra resources are needed to expand those services, but for now we deliver those services with the staff and resources we have in the communities. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to provide further details on the process that we are taking to implement the recommendations from the Supplementary Health Benefits Joint Working Group surrounding updates to the existing Extended Health Benefits Program.

The recommendations that were made by the Joint Working Group require varying levels of additional research and planning before implementation. We plan to move forward as quickly as we can while ensuring we have done our homework.

We will immediately begin working with the Department of Human Resources, and later on, other employers in the NWT...

The Members know, and the public should know, that the Joint Working Group provided the report to Cabinet and the Standing Committee on Priorities and Planning a couple of weeks ago, at the beginning of this session, actually, and we just got the response from SCOPP this Monday. We responded to that today, so we need time to work through the recommendations made in the Joint Working Group report.

The Members always speak to us about following the process and working together, and we will do that. We will have a work plan on Monday as to how we go forward. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I wish to table the following document entitled Report of the Supplementary Health Benefits Joint Working Group.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It’s status quo for the moment because the policy to bring them in has not been implemented. I will be coming back next week, I said, to work on how we move forward on those recommendations of the Joint Working Group, which included expansion of coverage to the working poor. Thank you.

To be fair and just going by my recollection, I believe what we were working on was to have some of our local people trained so that we could create more of a human resource pool for that office. I believe the starting time for that training program was this fall. I don’t have the most recent updates, so I’m willing to look into that. I believe our response last time was more than we know about that. I think it was more precise on our action plan. I will get back to the Member.

Mr. Speaker, he’s got to calm down. All that is saying is that we know, we’ve been talking about this 2007 Supplementary Health Policy for the last three years, and that’s been delayed. The implementation of it has been delayed and delayed and delayed. Had we not done anything, it was set to come into effect on November 1st. The important point here is that we are moving forward. We are accepting the report. We want to work together and we will share the information. We have to work together on how to bring this third-party insurance and pharmaceuticals strategy and all of the recommendations...

The Member is going into the details of which we have to still work on. That’s what I am saying in saying that we need to look at how we implement the recommendations made in the Joint Working Group. Part of it is to review parity and equity between the three programs. We need to figure out how do we encourage people to get third-party insurance, how do we encourage employers to get third-party insurance. We want that to be the first option, but we need to work out how that can be done. The Member made those suggestions in our review process and there are other suggestions, but those are...

These are important items. We take these recommendations very seriously. No, I will not be announcing on Monday that we are implementing these. I agree with the Members that these need work. We have knowledge in the department and I will be coming back on Monday to set a time frame and the process on when we’re going to get this work done and how we can work with the other side on implementing them. I will be consulting with the Members and sharing information and work through these ticket items, because those are important and we want to get them done.

I meant simply by that under supp health benefits, as it exists now -- not supp health -- extended health benefits, people with chronic conditions or requirements, they get paid right now. They are covered right now under the existing policy. So the catastrophic drug coverage question came in because of the changes that were proposed, but that’s gone. We said that this morning. So there is no need. We have the most generous Health Benefits Program in the North and they are all covered under the existing policy. Thank you.