Sick prospective immigrants barred from Canada: study
By Chelsea Howard
The Muse (Memorial University of Newfoundland)
June 3, 2009
ST. JOHN’S (CUP) – Peter Coyte, professor of health and economics at the University of Toronto, has found that immigrants are being denied into Canada based on their medical burden.
Canada’s Immigration Act outlines three major reasons why a person would be deemed medically inadmissible to the country.
Coyte’s research deals with the reason that the immigrant might cause excessive demands on health and social services.
Immigration Canada’s definition of excessive demand is $4,867.40 per year. If an immigrant could potentially incur more than this amount, he or she won’t be permitted to enter the country.
The study was designed to address whether or not Immigration Canada’s current cost threshold is reasonable, and if it isn’t, what would be a more appropriate threshold.
“We want to look at factors that would yield a HIV positive immigrant admissible if a new threshold was invoked,” said Coyte.
Coyte, a chair in health services research, focuses primarily on research, education, linkage, and exchange activities within Canada’s healthcare community.
This particular project has been ongoing over the past year, and is in the final stages of research.
Coyte, and Kednapa Thavorn from U of T’s Department of Health Policy, have been working toward finalizing research that assesses Canadian immigration decisions that deal with immigrants who are suffering from health conditions.
Based upon these consultations, Coyte and the other researchers involved constructed a statistical test to measure the amount of cost before a prospective immigrant’s healthcare burden is deemed to be excessive, or statistically different from that of Canadians.
The study shows that the current cost threshold is too low.
Coyte says it should be almost three times higher, at around $15,000.
This conclusion was reached based upon the distribution factor involved in health-care costs.
Research has shown that while average health-care costs are known, neither the variance nor the cost distribution is known with any certainty.
|
