Picco wants federal cash for medical travel

MICHAELA RODRIGUE

IQALUIT — The federal government should pay at least some of Nunavut’s rapidly escalating medical travel costs, Health Minister Ed Picco said.

“When I send someone from Grise Fiord to Ottawa… I’m picking up that cost. Whereas if an aboriginal person from northern Saskatchewan has to fly to Regina, then the federal government picks up those costs. So I want those costs picked up and that could help us out a little bit more,” Picco told reporters after returning from a meeting of provincial and territorial health ministers held last week in Markham, Ont.

Picco estimates that Ottawa should pay another $20 million for medical travel costs in Nunavut, Picco said.

“I’m not asking for anything that would seem to us that the other jurisdictions in Canada are not receiving,” Picco said.

If that money were to directly into Nunavut’s coffers, Picco said the department would then be free to spend in other parts of the system.

It doesn’t cover all of Nunavut’s medical costs, but it would cover about 20 per cent of Nunavut’s health care budget.

Canada’s health ministers are all calling for the Canada Health and Social Transfer (CHST) to be restored to 1994-1995 levels, with an escalator for today’s health care costs.

Under the current formula, that would give the Nunavut government only another $2 million, or about one per cent of its health and social services budget, Picco said.

But meeting the Nunavut’s health care needs goes far beyond restoring the CHST.

Picco said he has discussed the meeting with Nunavut Premier Paul Okalik, and plans to write a letter to federal Health Minister Allan Rock to describe outline the travel costs that aren’t picked up by the federal government.

Picco also tried use the health minister’s meeting to drive home the message that Nunavut is a unique jurisdiction with unique health care expenses.

“The cost factor on different sectors of the population are different. In most of mainstream Canada, they have an aging population, whereas here in Nunavut, we have a younger population and that’s causing stresses on our health care system,” Picco said.

Some provincial health ministers left the two-day meeting in Markham frustrated after Ottawa declined to offer any new money for Canada’s struggling health care system.

Federal Health Minister Allan Rock does not have the power to negotiate a new CHST, so the provinces now want Prime Minister Jean Chrétien to hold an emergency first ministers’ conference to discuss the issue.

But Chrétien has rejected that demand and has said that he will meet with the premiers once they decide on a “framework” for reforming health care system. But Picco says that reforms are already well underway.

“We are integrating the three health boards. We are trying to reform the system,” Picco said.

Picco would not speculate on whether the health department’s 2000-2001 budget will be enough, but he said health departments in other jurisdictions are perennially in deficit positions.

“I cannot see the future,” he said.

But he added any savings from the dissolution of Nunavut’s three regional health boards will go back into health care.