A passing student named Mike Hermanovsky found her crumpled in the ditch, her hands limp against her face. “Can you lift my head,” she kept asking him, “so I can breathe?”
Here, the health system operated at its finest: She was soon in a helicopter to Toronto's Sunnybrook Hospital, where she received specialized intensive care and, miraculously, began breathing on her own with in a few weeks. Now, at Lyndhurst, she receives daily physiotherapy.
So far, her part of the bill has come to no more than $45, her share of the helicopter fee. But in six months, when she expects to leave the centre, the bills will pile up quickly. Her sister has already moved from the United States to help their mother look after Ms. Dort-Kyne's three boys, but they expect they will need to move, to find something suitable in Toronto's expensive housing market, where her social support and doctors are located.
Ms. Dort-Kyne has some savings and some equity in her house, but “the money I have probably couldn't even pay for two years of care for myself and maintain a decent lifestyle for my children,” she says, sitting in her wheelchair in the Lyndhurst cafeteria.
Home care provided by the province is typically capped at 21 hours a week. The remaining costs could run up to $15,000 a month, says Chris Collins, a personal-injury lawyer who has been advising Ms. Dort-Kyne. And that doesn't count additional expenses, such the $40,000 wheelchair that will need to be replaced about every five years.
“It's almost incomprehensible,” says her brother, Robert Lendvai.
Her story also raises the question of why someone hurt driving a gas-guzzling vehicle receives greater compensation than someone biking or engaging in a sport. In Australia, a national commission tasked with that question has produced a proposal for a National Injury Insurance Scheme designed to cover the lifetime care and support needs of people who get a catastrophic injury, however it happens.
The commission has estimated the cost would be $830-million – roughly $35 per Australian – and has proposed that it be in place for vehicle accidents by 2013 and all catastrophic injuries by 2015.
Until Canada adopts a similar system, Ms. Dort-Kyne's case will remain an extreme illustration of why it's important people seek private insurance when out of work. Between a soft economy and a work force that has become accustomed to changing jobs, more and more people are spending stretches of time unemployed, voluntarily or not.
But not many affordable products cover what Ms. Dort-Kyne faces. Long-term-care insurance is expensive, relative to the odds of needing it. Long-term-disability insurance is more affordable, but it typically only replaces lost income. Critical-illness coverage will provide people with a lump-sum payment should they develop any of a list of diseases or disabilities. (About $120 a month allows $200,000 of coverage.)
But where does it stop? Should people who ride bikes be legally required to take out insurance, or those who climb mountains? If, as a B.C. cabinet minister suggested last January, governments should tax smokers at a higher rate, what's our responsibility to people injured while playing sports, an activity promoted by the government?
For now, Ms. Dort-Kyne's main focus is to get home with her boys, and eventually back to work. She has been breathing on her own since a few weeks after the accident, and she has able to move her head and make small shrugs with her shoulders. She's hoping to learn to turn that into more movement in one arm, enough to use devices. “I want to just get things done and move forward,” she says.
Friends and community groups have raised some money, but the family will bear most of the multimillion-dollar load. Whether they can manage it is a question for every Canadian, who could, by bad luck, end up in her situation some day.
“Lightning strikes and you never know where; in a split second, life changes forever,” Mr. Adair says. “There will be three or four more people like Tracy every day. We can do better.”
