Unpaid medical bills by non-Canadians top $40M in Manitoba over last 5 years

Manitoba’s health-care system has suffered nearly $40 million in losses over the past five years, owing to unpaid medical bills accumulated by people who are not Canadian residents.

Unpaid medical bills by non-Canadians top $40M in Manitoba over last 5 years To continue reading, please subscribe: Digital Subscription One year of digital access for only $205* - Enjoy unlimited reading on winnipegfreepress.com - Read the E-Edition, our digital replica newspaper - Access News Break, our award-winning app - Play interactive puzzles To continue reading, please subscribe: Add Free Press access to your Brandon Sun subscription for only an additional $1 for the first 4 weeks* Manitoba’s health-care system has suffered nearly $40 million in losses over the past five years, owing to unpaid medical bills accumulated by people who are not Canadian residents.

New figures, obtained by Alberta-based think tank SecondStreet.org via a freedom of information request, show Shared Health averaged about $7.9 million in losses each fiscal year between 2020 and 2025. “The big picture in Canada is that we have a system that’s in crisis from coast to coast, and if these dollars had been spent on helping Canadians with health care, then that could ease some of the pressure on the system.” Colin Craig, president of SecondStreet.org said Tuesday “Canadian taxpayers are spending millions of dollars on health-care services for people who don’t even live in Canada.”

Manitoba’s losses totalled $3.8 million in the fiscal year of 2020-21, $8.2 million in 2021-22, $4.5 million in 2022-23, $18.7 million in 2023-24 and $4.5 million in 2024-25, according to the Shared Health data. SecondStreet.org estimated money lost to unpaid medical debts in Manitoba could have instead funded hip replacement operations for about 3,400 patients.

Those numbers are based on a patient cost estimator tool created by the Canadian Institute for Health Information. Freedom of information requests filed with other provincial health authorities show a similar issue persists in Alberta, where losses totalled $92.3 million since 2020-21, and in British Columbia, where they reached $200.6 million in the same period. Craig outlined three potential policy solutions that his organization believes could help reduce the issue.

Those include provincial health regions creating requirements for visitors to pay upfront before medical treatment, except for situations in which they require lifesaving care. It also recommended the provincial government lobby Ottawa to require visitors to have travel health insurance before entering Canada. Such requirements exist in other countries, including in Europe, with some exemptions for certain nationalities.

Finally, Craig recommended the federal government ban re-entry to Canada for non-residents with outstanding bills for medical care. “Addressing this particular problem, it’s not going to solve all the problems in the health-care system, but when you start to address a whole bunch of issues like this, then you can start to see greater use of the money in the system helping patients,” Craig said. Manitoba Nurses Union president Darlene Jackson described the figures released by Shared Health as “shocking.”

“I can’t help but thinking that this money being poured back into our health-care system would absolutely benefit staff as well as patients,” Jackson said. The union leader said she was not aware of such losses being an issue in Manitoba before the data was released. Nurses who provide care to patients have no connection to the subsequent bills.

“Now, more than ever, we need to be looking at utilizing every dollar that we have in health care,” she said. “Let’s say I go to the U.S. and go to a hospital — I am billed, there’s no two ways about it. I have to pay before I leave.

So, I think it’s really important that we look at how we can actually collect this money.” An injection of $40 million into the health system could help bolster staffing, Jackson said. tyler.searle@freepress.mb.ca

Tyler Searle is a multimedia producer who writes for the Free Press’s city desk. A graduate of Red River College Polytechnic’s creative communications program, he wrote for the Stonewall Teulon Tribune, Selkirk Record and Express Weekly News before joining the paper in 2022. Read more about Tyler.

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