Feb. 27: Why the OAP income testing formula stinks

Here’s my Top 10 reasons why this income testing formula is awful. In no particular order.

Top 10 problems with the income testing formula

1. The starting point is ridiculously low. Imagine being a two-earner family with 3 kids, living in downtown Toronto, earning $56,000, and being told you’re “too rich” to receive full funding for your child with autism.
2. The system is impossible to understand, because of the role lifetime “Childhood Budgets” plays in the formula, along with the yearly amounts, and the yearly income review. Try forecasting how much you can spend each year. It’s so complicated the government itself can’t come up with a calculator, or an explanation!
3. The maximum amount of money under any scenario can never pay for intensive therapy, in part because the formula doesn’t take into account a child’s need.
4. There is a massive “marriage penalty” built in for single parents. Suppose you’re a single mom with sole custody of a child. If you get married (or common-law) you could potentially lose over $100,000 of your “Childhood Budget”.
5. Similarly, there is a significant incentive in getting divorced.
6. The income test acts as a marginal tax rate, and as such provides a disincentive for parents to re-enter the labour force.
7. Similarly, many families with autism are higher income. Removing most/all of their funding is a large tax on those families, and creates an incentive to move to jurisdictions where care is provided, like most U.S. states. There is a potential brain drain issue here (good luck attracting and retaining tech workers).
8. Mental health is health, and should be treated as such. In Canada, we don’t income-test health care. Period. If that’s a road Ontario wants to go down, then let’s have that conversation, and apply it across the board. Don’t use children with autism as your guinea pigs.
9. Because the Childhood Budget changes each year as your income changes, and because you can spend up to 20% of your current Childhood Budget in year, you can wind up in a situation where you overspend and owe the government back spending.
10. This “plan” was put together on the back of a napkin, and it shows. These plans should be done in consultations with experts, parents, adults with autism and policy wonks, not just sketched out in broad detail and thrown on a website.

There are other reasons as well, but those are my 10.