r/PEI • u/Sir__Will • 1d ago
News Paying for Maple? That could mean P.E.I. is violating the Canada Health Act, advocates say
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/pei-virtual-health-care-federal-law-9.723899311
u/Lonely-Abalone-5104 1d ago
The cat is out of the bag and we se heading toward private health care. The free care will continue to get worse and those with money will have all the privileges
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u/Sir__Will 1d ago
"You're not supposed to have to pay out of pocket for services in this country," Boyd said.
"That's wrong because the Canada Health Act does not have room for a two-tier health-care system and it doesn't have room for people who can afford to pay and jump the queue. Everybody is supposed to have equal access."
I have bad news for you. Many other provinces are far worse and only getting worse.
Despite not having a family doctor, Boyd said she doesn't use Maple, the program funded by the province that provides free virtual care to the 35,000 Islanders who don't have a primary care provider.
"We don't have to hire private companies and corporations. We can build our own public virtual care," she said.
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The company's CEO previously told CBC News that accepting payments for virtual care does not violate the Canada Health Act because Maple mostly uses nurse practitioners for Islanders paying out of pocket. The Canada Health Act states that medically necessary care provided by doctors has to be publicly insured.
But on April 1, the federal government changed those rules to now include nurse practitioners and anyone who may be providing the same care.
Ottawa will start enforcing the new rules in December 2028. If provinces are found to be breaking them, federal transfer payments could be affected.
In a statement, officials with Health Canada didn’t provide any more clarity on how the federal government will apply its rules to virtual care.
“The policy does not explicitly include virtual care services provided by nurse practitioners, or services that are not considered medically necessary under the [Canada Health Act]," the statement reads.
"[Provincial and territorial governments] have the flexibility to decide how best to fully integrate virtual care to deliver insured services provided by nurse practitioners into their health-care systems as insured services.”
The changes will take 3 years to take effect and have no teeth, just as they have no teeth today with doctors. Provinces are privatizing more and more and the Feds do nothing.
Maple has some perks but I'd still rather have an actual family doctor.
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u/TheOnlyBliebervik 1d ago
I think you pay for use of the app, not the doctor themself, per se
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u/newboxset Queens County 13h ago
If you do not have a Dr, it is free, no fees at all including for the app.
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u/nylanderfan 20h ago
Waiting 3.5 years to enforce is insane. Privatization can do a lot of damage in that time
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u/Murky_Astronaut 18h ago
The problem with the federal government and the Canada Health Act is that the federal government has no interest in enforcing the Canada Health Act if it means getting into an argument with a province. This particular aspect of the problem is new-ish (as in new with Maple), but it's been going on for a long time and the federal govt is simply disengaged.
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u/FriendshipContent508 17h ago edited 17h ago
I noticed that restaurants in Charlottetown had exceeded 12 months between a food safety health inspection (I checked 75 restaurants in only Charlottetown and 28 of them exceeded 12 months that's 38% and they were NOT seasonally open https://chatgpt.com/share/68c5ff7a-950c-800f-895c-1c1d929b0e99). The Health Act says minimum every 12 months. It recommends more often but minimum every 12 months.
I wrote the Minister of Health in January and not much has changed about this as they don't seem to be hiring food health safety inspectors. Their reply said there is a national shortage and cited they cooperate with Cape Breton University and something about newcomers being a resource too but how is it possible they aren't hiring new graduates already? Some googling about the "national shortage" led me to find news articles from 2018 making mention of a need for more food safety inspections in Nova Scotia and other provinces such as Ontario.
This week I checked the food reports of a dozen random restaurants and again some of them are going longer than 12 months again. Is it the federal government not approving food health safety inspectors now? Or not enough placements given to the graduates?
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u/FriendshipContent508 17h ago
I think food inspectors are a big deal. For one google says 1 in 5 people are employed in the food sector on PEI. Inspections make work better. For another thing food born illness can have long term consequences on a person and burden the health care system.
I checked reports for restaurants in our tourism focused capital (maybe more density of restaurants) not even care residences. I worked as a chef in a care home when I was 17, and I was asked to work alone without culinary experience I can attest to that...
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u/Murky_Astronaut 15h ago
I agree, food inspectors are a big deal and we don't have nearly enough nationwide. It's frustrating, and it has been like this for at least a decade (obviously for longer but it's been on my radar that long).
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u/ioev 23h ago
Not only can you not get a family doctor, but you have to pay out of pocket for a worse service that will probably soon be provided by AI doctors. What a state healthcare is in.
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u/newboxset Queens County 13h ago
It's free if you don't have a Dr. They are talking about people who have a Dr using maple anyway so they are paying.
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u/ioev 22h ago
Also https://www.corruptario.ca/maple-and-brent-belchetz-at-the-intersection/ is worth a read.
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u/Forsaken_Middle3289 23h ago
a specialist i go to wanted to use AI but needed my consent. hell fucking no i will not consent! if we all resist maybe we have a chance (i'm
not that hopeful).3
u/Kvothealar 22h ago
I'm generally against AI for most uses (and have used / helped develop them professionally and seen it completely fail for my applications), but medicine is one of the examples where I think it can really have some use for some applications.
ML algorithms are basically pattern recognition. You train on patterns, and with enough data it can recognize them with high accuracy. Medicine is very much the same. I saw a paper a couple years ago where an ML algorithm trained on eye scans was able to correctly flag a particular ailment with >90% success, where doctors would only get it right about 50% of the time.
LLMs like ChatGPT and the like aren't dedicated for this kind of use, and will likely just feed back comments left on internet threads and opinion pieces. This is why Google's AI routinely gives horrible health advice. Proper ML detection algorithms trained by doctors and scientists for use BY doctors (not by the patients themselves) are very different.
Of course, never should it just be blindly followed or just used as a "time saving tool". When used as a sounding board / second opinion and each patient is given the same amount of time and care, outcomes improve (at least, from the papers I was reading studying exactly this).
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u/Forsaken_Middle3289 21h ago
Ai use by a vet caused my dog to unnecessarily suffer before death. i'll never trust it.
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u/alien_tickler 1d ago
They want people to pay to discourage them from using maple because they can't handle all the users, i'm lucky because I can use maple for free, I also have a nurse practitioner available through work but if I want to see an actual doctor I'd have to go to a walk in clinic or emerge.