TORONTO — Ontario will look at what can be learned from the tragic story of a young man who was stranded abroad after falling ill during a trip to Mexico and died months later in hospital, Premier Dalton McGuinty said Wednesday.

"I know that the minister is making sure that we can draw whatever lessons that we possibly can from these particular circumstances and move as quickly as we can to bring people back who are in need of health care here," he told the legislature.

Clayton Leveille, 21, became seriously ill while on vacation with his girlfriend last July. He had medical insurance, but waited seven weeks to be taken home because there were no hospital beds available in his hometown of St. Catharines, his mother said.

After three weeks in a Mexico hospital, Leveille was taken to a hospital in Florida where he was treated for four weeks. He was finally brought home and treated, but died in January, said Laurie Leveille.

She's still not sure what killed her son. He was initially treated for dengue fever in Mexico, but his doctors in Ontario believe he may have suffered from a rare blood disorder known as HLH, or hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis.

But Clayton wasn't treated fairly and given the hospital care he should have received, she said.

The insurance company, which was paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for his care, wanted to bring him back to Ontario. But they told her that provincial rules required that Clayton be brought back to his local hospital in St. Catharines, which had no beds available.

The hospital wouldn't be able to send him elsewhere until it conducted a battery of tests to figure out whether it would be able to treat him, she said.

"I never, ever in my wildest dreams would have thought that they wouldn't want a person from Ontario to come back to Ontario," she said. "I always thought Canada wanted its citizens here, and that opened my eyes."

But provincial officials say it's up to the insurance companies to arrange for transportation of their clients, and they don't have to go through the ministry to bring a patient home.

"It's up to the insurance company to work to find out where that capacity is," said Health Minister Deb Matthews. "That's how it works. Hospital to hospital, doctor to doctor."

Leveille said her grief over her son's death is so raw, it still hurts to talk about it. But she went public with his story to prevent another family from going through the same ordeal.

"I don't think anyone should suffer like he did," Leveille said, fighting back tears. "He was 21 years old. He died six days before his 22nd birthday. And he was just starting to live. I think something has to be done so no other person is treated this way."

Clayton spent the majority of his time in the St. Catharines hospital, which tried to keep him alive, but wasn't able to diagnose the mysterious disease that plagued him, she said.

A family friend convinced a doctor at Toronto's Princess Margaret hospital to take his case, but it wouldn't admit him. So the family shuttled Clayton from Toronto back to his home in St. Catharines, often after undergoing tests that left him in excruciating pain.

"When a patient is this sick, and one thing after another piles on, mentally he's just being drained," Leveille said. "I remember at the end, looking in his eyes, and he would sometimes just shake his head like, 'Everyone gave up on me."'

The final blow came when she received a letter addressed to Clayton after he died. It was from a collection agency seeking money for his ambulance ride from the airport in St. Catharines to the hospital.

McGuinty offered his condolences to the Leveille family Wednesday after the NDP raised the matter in the legislature.

"The best that I can say is that we work as hard as we can, through all of our health care providers, to ensure that if there is someone who finds themself in need outside the country, we move as quickly as we possibly can to have that person returned to an Ontario health setting, like a hospital," he said. "I know that great efforts were made in this particular case."

But he also warned residents that OHIP only covers a "limited number of services" while travelling abroad.

"I think I should also take the opportunity to remind Ontarians that when they're travelling out of the country, we encourage them to obtain private travel insurance," McGuinty said.

Matthews said she will talk to the insurance industry to see how the province can "better inform and educate" them on the process of getting sick patients back home.

That's not enough, said NDP Leader Andrea Horwath.

"Had there been a bed available for him in St. Catharines, he would have been able to be moved immediately," she said. "It speaks to the whole problem that we have in our hospital system where beds aren't available for people when they need them."

And the Leveille family isn't alone, Horwath added.

A Woodbridge man was stuck in St. Louis for two months, unable to secure a Toronto hospital bed, she said. Her office receives calls "all too frequently" from families in similar situations.