Refugee claimants' access to healthcare in Quebec: subjective experiences and contested media representations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A central question for any publically subsidized healthcare system is the extent to which non-citizens should be granted access. Refugee claimants, by definition, are not yet citizens of the host state and a continued debate is over what legitimate claims they have on social resources like healthcare vis-à-vis citizens. In Canada, the question of what extent refugees and refugee claimants should have access to healthcare was contested publically in the wake of cuts to the Interim Federal Health Program (IFHP). For over 50 years the Canadian government provided relatively comprehensive health insurance coverage to refugees and refugee claimants through the IFHP. The federal Conservative government (February 2006 – November 2015) significantly reduced the scope of this health coverage on June 30, 2012. The present thesis research was conducted in the province of Quebec and responds to two related topics – the framing of refugee claimants in the media, and the understanding and experiences of claimants in regards to the healthcare access barriers that they faced. A first paper analyses the debate that ensued following the IFHP cuts, one that the pitted the Conservative government's framing of refugee claimants as 'bogus' against health provider advocates' framing of claimants as 'victims'. While the victim frame arguably "won", the language of advocates could be much enriched by incorporating rights-based arguments. This would lessen some of the negative ramifications of victim framing. In a second paper, refugee claimants' subjective experiences of the healthcare services are examined. Claimants reported experiencing a number of impacts of barriers, including to their physical, mental, and financial wellbeing, and to their sense of belonging in Canada. Results suggest that although there are actual limitations in health coverage, as well as confusion and prejudices from providers, it is noteworthy that claimants' understanding of their own situation has its own consequences, for instance diminished health-seeking.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".