Toronto woman Rose Celeste says she spent years avoiding a visit to the doctor.
As an undocumented migrant worker, she feared something as simple as a checkup could lead to her deportation back to the Philippines.
But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit three years ago, that changed. The province directed hospitals to temporarily provide medically necessary care to patients without coverage while it reimbursed them for the expense — something that led Celeste, 61, to discover and then treat her thyroid cancer.
Without this program, she estimates she’d be thousands of dollars in the red trying to pay for health care herself — or worse,
