Health Minister Kelvin Goertzen is working on improvements to an agreement for residents of the RM of Piney who get hospital services in Roseau and Warroad, Minnesota. He made the comment after negotiating a settlement for Sprague resident Robin Milne who was left with a $118,000 (U.S.) hospital bill for treatment after a heart attack last fall. Milne will not have to pay a $64,000 hospital bill and the province is negotiating to settle a $40,000 bill for medical transport. Milne ended up being airlifted to a hospital in Grand Forks, North Dakota and that's when the billing situation became complicated.

Goertzen says the hospital agreement for Piney needs more clarity.

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Health Minister Kelvin Goertzen"It speaks only to the fact that services are covered in Warroad and Roseau, those are the only two locations where services are covered and that's where we got into the difficult situation when there are transfers to other hospitals in the United States. So, we need to make it more clear and be more definitive about what services are covered. And they've changed, services that are available in Canada, in the southeast have changed a lot in the last two decades (since the agreement was written) and the services that are available in Roseau, in particular, have changed a lot in the last two decades, so we need to be more definitive and we will."

Goertzen says, in his discussions with U.S. health officials, they concluded the agreement works well 99.9% of the time, but, when it doesn't work, it's a spectacular failure. He adds the revised document will try to eliminate that. He says his department is also striving for better communication when a call comes in from those U.S. hospitals for a Life Flight to Winnipeg, to make sure that it receives urgent attention. In Milne's case, there was no response for 90 minutes to the call for a life flight so the decision was made to fly him to Grand Forks.