A Filipina caregiver in Canada may be sent home for her expensive dialysis costs, which exceeds what the country’s healthcare system can shoulder.

The 33-year-old Kherin Dimalanta is suffering from a chronic kidney disease that would cost $40,000 or approximately PHP1.9 million annually for dialysis.

In a report by state-run Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (CBC), it said that Dimalanta’s bid for citizenship may not push through since “prospective immigrants who would cost the health-care system more than $21,204 a year are ineligible for permanent residency because they’re deemed an excessive burden”.

Her situation has rendered her hopeless, saying that the disease took away her right to dream of bringing her children there in Canada.

Two years have already passed but no decision has been made on Dimalanta’s application for permanent residency on humanitarian and compassionate grounds, which usually takes years to process.

She also applied for an open work permit so that she would be eligible for OHIP, Ontario’s healthcare plan, and would have the freedom to return to the Philippines to see her children.

Dimalanta has not since seen her children for almost four years now. The last time she went home was in April 2017 where she last saw her children.

Member of Parliament Raquel Dancho said she has raised Dimalanta’s ordeal before Canada’s legislature but Liberals, she added, had been “sitting on her humanitarian and compassionate” application for a year now.

Without the approval, Dancho said Dimalanta will be forced to return to the Philippines. She described the delay as “completely un-Canadian” considering the contribution Dimalanta has made to the COVID effort and at the same time as a taxpaying member of Canadian society.

Under the country’s law, excessive demand on health or social services is one of the three grounds for medical inadmissibility, apart from danger to public health and danger to public safety.