Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I would like to talk today about the ever becoming more famous Supplementary Health Benefits Policy of this government. Mr. Speaker, we have to start at the beginning and say, why change the policy? Some are saying because it was a decision of a previous government the policy was changed. Now we are just on the implementation end of that so we have to proceed with it. That is what they told us about the Deh Cho Bridge too. It wasn’t a very good reason.
Mr. Speaker, I think we need to look at this very carefully and very critically. What this debate on the supplementary health benefits has done inadvertently and unfortunately is made it look like in order to help people in a certain income bracket who are not beneficiaries of other health insurance that in order to help them, we needed to reduce the services to another group of people and we all know that, being the seniors of the Northwest Territories. This is the picture that emerges, that we want to take away from this group to give to this group. Mr. Speaker, that is pitting people against each other and that is not a good premise for how we are doing this.
Unfortunately, that is just the tip of what this policy would actually do. If this policy, if implemented the way it is laid out right now, proceeds as it is, in fact, there are going to be people who will opt out of third-party insurance in order to participate in this government. I know the government means well by expanding it. By expanding it, though, they are giving people the opportunity of not participating in employer health insurance programs and different things where they do pay premiums and to get this from the government at no cost. What is the cost? Who has to add up the cost? Who has quantified what the cost of that is? We can’t afford mistakes.
As long as we get a great idea, we see a mosquito on the window and we take a sledge hammer to kill it. I am sorry. We have seen this happen with board reform. Oh, we are going from 70 to seven. What it does is it takes what is in it, the essence of some very good ideas, and just blows it out of the water because we try to capture and bundle too many things within one policy.
Mr. Speaker, I know I don’t have a lot more time left, but I just want to caution the government, I beg the government, I beseech them to please look at all the ramifications of this, not to look at this in a superficial manner, please, because we cannot afford to spend millions of dollars unnecessarily, not with the kinds of challenges and demands that we have on our health care system today. Thank you.