Thank you, Madam Chair.
Good morning. Thank you for inviting me to speak to you today.
I am the Director General of the Health Management Branch of Citizenship and Immigration Canada. My branch holds the responsibility for delivering the Interim Federal Health Program, also referred to as IFH. This is a health coverage plan which reimburses the costs of health services for refugees, individuals who claim asylum in Canada, individuals who are detained under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, and victims of human trafficking.
There are approximately 128,000 clients eligible for this program. In terms of numbers and the breakdown by client type, approximately 110,000 are asylum seekers--that's refugee claimants--and approximately 18,000 are convention refugees who were selected abroad and resettled in Canada. There are usually, at maximum, 300 individuals detained at a given time. There are approximately 10 to 15 victims of trafficking throughout the year.
The expenditures of IFH are included in the attached table. For 2008-09, the program expenditures were $65 million, and there were approximately 550,000 claims. The program has seen a significant increase in cost. The program reimburses basic health care services, similar to what's available through provincial plans for Canadian citizens and residents, and supplemental health services, such as medication and dental and vision care, similar to what's offered on provincial social assistance.
The IFH program is operated as an insurance plan. Their clients, with the exception of detainees, obtain their services from the provincial-territorial health network and practitioners, and IFH reimburses the cost of such care. This means that IFH is not the actual provider of care. It should be thought of as more of a reimburser. We recognize the importance of fee schedules to help ensure access to services, which is why the program aligns its fee schedule as much as possible with provincial fee schedules. To process a claim, we utilize a third-party claim administrator.
The role of CIC in delivering this program is to define program policy, to define the benefit structure, and to maintain oversight of the claim administrator activity. It should be noted that the detainees are held in Canada Border Services Agency detention centres. Contracts are in place with medical providers, who come to the centre for eight hours a week to deliver health care. The costs are covered by IFH.
In conclusion, because the mandate of the program is to reimburse health care services provided by the PIT health care system, we do not deal directly with issues related to access to care, compensation of physicians or other health care professionals or high turnover of health care staff. However, as for the other Federal Healthcare Partnership partners, the considerable increase in program expenditures reflects the fact that the cost to obtain health services has grown significantly
Thank you. I would be pleased to answer any questions Committee members might have.