A few months ago I renewed my child's OHIP
card. At that time I expressed my concerns regarding the
prohibitive and costly identification requirements for
health-care eligibility. The ministry staff required I show
three pieces of my personal identification, plus my health-care
card.
Subsequently, I wrote a series of letters to
government ministries, my own provincial representative and the
local ministry manager voicing my concerns
about the prohibitive nature and cost of the
required identification and the new system of information
sharing.
Now I find my health-care status under
threat. I have a red-and-white OHIP card and have received a
number of notices that I must now register for a "temporary"
health-care card. (The new card will have) an expiry date, a
photo, and an involuntarily information gathering and sharing
agreement in order to avoid any "complication with my
continuing health-care coverage."
Since the Ministry of Health has very
recently (February) verified my identification, they are fully
aware of my eligibility for OHIP.
However, if I accept their ultimatum and a
"temporary" OHIP card, the time may come when I will become
ineligible for OHIP because I have become
too poor to obtain and maintain a sufficient
amount of personal identification to prove my ongoing
eligibility.
Along with the costs and potential roadblocks
to continuously proving eligibility, I'm also asked to sign an
information gathering and sharing agreement. This agreement has
been promoted as a way to ensure doctors can spare patients
from cumulative or adverse drug reactions, as well as prevent
"prescription shopping" by addicts.
Perhaps some of these ends can be met by such
a broad agreement, but the consequences of such an agreement
are dire and foreseeable. This agreement makes the medical
sexual history of patients available to any professional beyond
any discretionary or need-to-know-basis.
Allow me two examples: a teenaged rape
victim's optometrist doesn't need to know that he or she has
recently received treatments to avoid any potential HIV or
AIDS; a opthalmologist doesn't need to know whether a patient
has recently had an abortion.
I would not willingly share such information
with many receptionists, nurses, physiotherapists, non-related
specialists, or technologists.
Furthermore with the guarantee of medical
confidentiality gone, many victims of sexual crimes will not
report incidents to their doctors; many do not
report to the police for this exact
reason.
I can't allow my government to override my
right (legally and morally) to a privileged relationship with
my doctors for the sake "protecting" our health-care
system.
If the Ministry of Health cannot find a way
to protect health care without endangering and rendering
ineligible the poor and abused in our society - the people who
statistically need health care the most, then I submit we no
longer have a universal program to protect.
The identification requirements should be
changed so that, at the very least, the indigent, mentally ill
or chronically homeless can access health care.
I have no interest in turning these people
into fraud statistics in their darkest hours when they will
inevitably attempt to access health care for themselves or
their children by any means. The information sharing agreement
must be modified to allow medical sexual histories to be
protected, as the broad scope of the information sharing
required now leaves many already vulnerable patients in a much
more vulnerable and certainty compromised position.
Daryl Shandro
,
Greater Sudbury