The Tribune

ALTHOUGH the PLP government seemed to have no difficulty spending $10m in consultancy fees to set up a National Health Insurance scheme, it could not find $642,567.70, part of which was urgently needed to repair the roof of the Princess Margaret Hospital damaged by Hurricane Matthew in October last year.

As a result, the Minnis government will now have to spend even more than that because — thanks to lack of repair to the roof — the recent rains have flooded the female medical 1, male medical 2, and damaged the dialysis area and a part of the old administrative building. Urgent repairs have now started on the hospital’s roof.

It was not as though the Christie government had not been reminded of the urgency of the repairs. In a letter dated May 26 this year, the PLP government’s attention was again directed to a letter dated November 30 last year “regarding Hurricane Matthew claims totaling $920,733.70 of which $642,567.70 related to critical capital works, including roof repairs for the Princess Margaret Hospital and the Rand Memorial Hospital. This matter is of major concern as we have yet to receive the required funding and we are days away from the commencement of the 2017 hurricane season. Hence, I am again urging that the requested funds be provided, so that we may carry out repairs to our facilities to ensure that they are all in a state of readiness.”

Obviously, this urgent reminder was ignored. Princess Margaret Hospital’s roof is only now undergoing repairs after further damage has been done to the hospital.

As for the the over stated and much promised National Health Insurance (NHI) — obviously an unworkable scam to win votes – it crashed before it could even get off the ground. So anxious was the Christie government to pin its election win on improved health services that it started patients’ enrolment in the scheme on April 24, just nine days before the May 10 election.

Obviously, Bahamians were not fooled this time considering the PLP’s massive defeat at the polls. However, some doctors and patients fell into the medical spider’s web, from which they are now trying to extricate themselves. Recently, we received a couple of calls — doctors wanting to know when and if they were to be paid for their services rendered to their NIB patients. It is now a question as to whether the set up of the plan had been completed by the PLP government making it possible for the new Board to legally make any payments at all.

Last month, the Bahamas Insurance Association pointed out that certain aspects of the NHI, by the time the scheme was launched, had not even been gazetted. The proper corporate structure had to be in place before anyone could be paid anything. Also the scheme was launched without knowing where the funds were coming from to pay for it. If this is so, who is going to pay the bills of the doctors who were sucked into the scheme? A scheme that was not only not properly constituted, but with no plans as to how it was to be funded. Dr Sands has said that no funds will be made under the NHI scheme until a proper structure is in place and even then the Board will take legal advice as to the validity of the contracts entered into by the NHI.

As Health Minister, Dr Duane Sands has said, The Bahamas would “absolutely” have suffered another credit rating downgrade if it had gone ahead with NHI, not having identified how it was to be paid for. The IMF also made it clear that the scheme left by the Christie government was “unsustainable.”

We hate to be in the “we told you so” chorus, but from the beginning The Tribune has been against the scheme advising that whatever funds government could raise should first go towards upgrading the third rate hospital before putting an elaborate scheme on top of what was already there that could neither be funded nor staffed. Already PMH is understaffed.

Recently, we had an opportunity to take a tour of the hospital — not just the new Critical Care Unit, but the old section of the hospital. What a shock! We knew it was bad, but not quite that bad.

As Health Minister Sands has said the PLP’s NHI plan was a “pie in the sky” scheme given the fiscal realities of the country. Members of the new Health Board, chaired by Julian Rolle, have a daunting task before them. It is now time for them to roll up their sleeves and get to work. They have much to do in five years and will have succeeded if they only get the PMH up to an acceptable standard.