Government expects $140M in savings this year with refugee health care co-pay

OTTAWA — Implementing a co-pay from asylum seekers and refugee claimants for some health care services will cut public costs by about $140 million, the government estimates in a written response to the House of Commons.

To address a soaring price tag for the Interim Federal Health Program, the government introduced the new co-pay on May 1 for supplementary and prescription health coverage.

Claimants will cover a $4 fee for prescriptions and cover 30 per cent of the cost for services not typically covered by the public health care system, such as dental work, vision care, counselling, home care and medical devices.

NDP MP Heather McPherson posed several questions about the new co-pay in a written question submitted to the government, known as an order paper question. The government has to respond, in writing, typically within 45 days.

The answer, provided on Wednesday, shows overall the co-pays are expected to cover about $140 million in 2026-27, including $92.9 million in savings from dental care alone.

Another $10.6 million is expected to be saved on prescriptions, $6.2 million from vision care, and $16.7 million from counselling. The remaining savings are classified as “other.”

Routine doctor visits, emergency medicine, vaccines, hospital stays and lab work continue to be fully covered by the program.

The government response contains a month-by-month breakdown of all Interim Federal Health Program claims, sorted by province and territory, between April 2024 and November 2025.

Dental coverage is the largest expense for supplemental health care, covering nearly 2.5 million appointments worth over $443 million in that time frame.

The Canadian Press has requested cumulative sums of program costs from the immigration department.

Conservative immigration critic Michelle Rempel Garner has pushed for further reforms to the program, including restricting those with rejected asylum claims to coverage for emergency life-saving care only. The program allows for coverage through the refugee claim appeal process.

“We know that there’s a high percentage of people who are in the years-long backlog of asylum claims that will be found to have invalid claims. So that’s problem one. Problem two is the backlog itself,” she said in a telephone interview with The Canadian Press.

“So we have this issue now where there’s a massive strain on the program and on the services that it provides because it wasn’t designed to support that.”

The number of asylum claims and refugees coming to Canada has grown dramatically since 2020. With more people making claims and getting refugee status the cost of the program grew to nearly $900 million in the 2024-25 fiscal year from around $211 million in 2020/21.

A February report from the parliamentary budget officer projected the cost of the program at $1.1 billion for the 2026-27 fiscal year, without accounting for the new co-pay regime. The PBO estimated that cost would grow to $1.5 billion in the 2029-30 fiscal year.

The PBO analysis found much of the cost growth is being driven by an increasing number of claims from asylum seekers. The backlog of pending asylum claims was around 300,000 at the end of 2025.

About 30,000 of these asylum claims are expected to be deemed ineligible due to a new law that restricts asylum claims to being made within the first year someone arrives in Canada.

The interim federal health program is meant to provide short term coverage for asylum seekers and refugees until they go onto provincial health coverage.

The government expects about 480,000 asylum claimants and 67,000 landed refugees to use the program in 2026-27.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 7, 2026.

David Baxter, The Canadian Press