Thank you for the question.
The opportunity to divert a massive amount of demand from the health care system is huge. I recognize that you're diverting it from the provincial budget in the health care system, but if we think of a single taxpayer, it's important for us to save to the whole system. In this case, at this point, it's estimated that family caregivers provide 70% of the community care now for seniors. We estimate that the value of their work, and there has been research that indicates this, is somewhere around $25 billion a year. That's the kind of money you'd have to spend if you didn't have these people providing care.
The cost per person in home care versus being in an institution at the same level of care was described in a 1990 document; I would say the numbers would be more dramatically different now. The document indicated that with moderate care at home the annual amount would be around $9,500, and in an institution around $25,000, for a 63% saving for that one individual. In heavy care, obviously the savings would be less because at home you still have to pay professional home-care workers as well. The difference there was between $35,000 and $45,000, but I just checked today, and the Province of Ontario pays a per diem per resident valued at $55,000 a year. In that circumstance, that's not even counting the co-pay the family pays for nursing home care. In such a case, your savings are less dramatic because you have heavy care at home as well. Nonetheless, there are huge dollars.
If we looked at the approximately 600,000 people who need heavy care, then we're looking at the difference in savings, when you multiply that out, in the neighbourhood of $6 billion a year between having them at home versus having them in institutional care. So those are the magnitudes of dollars that can be saved.
Please don't hold me to those exact calculations. I think this is something the finance department should probably apply some resources to, in order to get exact figures. But those are the magnitudes.
