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.