Sandy Lee

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.

Those are the changes that I will be coming forward with next week with a time frame and short-term, mid-term and long-term implementation plans, what we need to do and work together on in order to implement the changes that were suggested in the Joint Working Group and where we could move forward.

The recommendation that we have that we need to look at it is to encourage people to get third-party insurance and use it first. So we need to look at that. We will be coming back with a work plan on how long we need to take to look at those. We hope to be able to do that sooner than later and what best way there is to encourage people to do that. We will be making those proposals. Thank you.

I do agree with the Member that the most important pillar of the Supplementary Health Policy that we rescinded is the fact that we would have been able to expand the coverage to the working poor as of next Monday. That aspect was the most immediate and present Anti-Poverty Strategy that we had that we are not able to implement. I agree with the Member that we need to look at that. We’re going to look at that in a package with all the other suggestions that the Joint Working Group had asked us to work on and Cabinet is committed to looking at that.

Of course, in any changes, we work with the...