Thank you, Mr. Speaker. If you think that Supplementary Health Benefits Program is a safety net program and to say that to access it is either you have to have insurance and if you don’t, the government will help you and to say that if you have an insurance program, you can’t access the program and to say that that is a discrimination, that is kind of a strange way of looking at that. What we are saying is that the government will be there for you. If you have other insurance, access that first and if you don’t, we will help you.

Like I said yesterday, Mr. Speaker, the Member has a point. Any insurance program like this has a built-in incentive for people to dump their insurance because government picks them up. Right now, we have that in the system. Anybody who is over 60, they have no incentive to keep their insurance. In fact, a lot of government employees have a pension health plan and they are told don’t get that because the GNWT will cover for that. If you have a chronic condition, there is no incentive to do that.

What I am saying is, with all the resources we have or not enough resources we have, if we have a program where people that access those elsewhere, we need to build that in. The fact of the matter is, yes, for those new people we are bringing in in the lower income, yes, there is a possibility that people could drop that, so I am willing to work with the Member to see how we can prevent that.

The fact of the matter is, over the years now, next 10 or 20 years, employers and everybody else would ask the government to take this on. They

would expect the government to be the last resort of an insurance, which is more reason why we need to define who is going to have access to this program and we have to say we are going to cover the poor first. We are going to cover the poor and the lower income, youth, women, seniors and men, and for those of you on top of the income threshold, if you could get insurance elsewhere, I am sorry to tell you, you have to go and get that first and get that second and because we need to spend health care on other things, that is called core services.

Mr. Speaker, this is a value question. It is a huge public policy question. I am sympathetic. I am willing to listen to the Members on the other side, but you can’t say, okay, we don’t like this. We have people who don’t like it. They want you to cover everybody. Do universal, raise taxes. Unless you are going to do that, delay for another 10 years. I hope that we can work out a solution. Thank you.