Barbados has needed a new general hospital for many years, so it was good to hear Minister of Health Donville Inniss say last week that a new one will indeed be built.
However, in the economic circumstances confronting us right now, we need to hear how it will be financed.
Perhaps Minister of FInance Chris Sinckler will let us know today at his press conference.
The options include digging deeper into the NIS’ remaining surplus; raising money through T-Bills or debentures ; do a VECO-like BOLT; and, as part of the mix, get the Inter-American Development Bank to put up a chunk of the capital.
It strikes me that the health minister’s statement at the same time that private patients will have to start paying upfront for their estimated hospital stays, because millions of dollars of such debt is still owed to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, was meant to show the targeted financiers that no revenue stream would be left untapped by the hospital authorities.
This is as it should be. But why not go the next step and add a health care or insurance payment to the NIS in order to deliver better health care for all?
Yes, I know Tom Adams proposed it and it failed miserably, but times have changed and the contract between the Barbados nanny state and its citizens when it comes to health needs to be better defined.
My focus today is to agree wholeheartedly with Minister Inniss, whom I consider to be a most realistic and capable manager and perhaps among the top two or three best in the current administration.
Right now what the economy needs are large projects that will build out new, or re-build, tired infrastructure, including the hospital, but also the highways and byways, schools like the beautiful new one at Egerton Road, which combines the old St. David’s and South District primary schools, and so on.
To help raise the money for such projects, we could sell shares in the airport and seaport to private investors without giving up control. They are successful, profit-making businesses, aren’t they?
How about liberating CBC from the deathly grip of successive administrations? Sorry I was just trying get my word count for this article up a bit, as I know that idea will never, ever go anywhere. Moving on.
Austerity policies have formed the bulk of this administration’s economic programme so far, and they are not going to get us out of this slump. As New York Times columnist, the economist Paul Krugman, noted in his column late last week:
“Greece has been pushed by its austerity measures into an ever-deepening slump — and that slump, not lack of effort on the part of the Greek government, was the reason a classified report to European leaders concluded last week that the existing program there was unworkable. Britain’s economy has stalled under the impact of austerity, and confidence from both businesses and consumers has slumped, not soared.”
Austerity programmes are demanded by the ratings agencies as the price for not have your debt-rating lowered, and by the IMF (until recently) as the price for bailouts.
So the rich few around the world, who caused the problem by their greed and avarice in selling products to investors and then buying counter policies which would make them richer should those products, and even economies, fail, keep getting bailed out by governments, while we the average people in the street pay for it.
We pay for it by having almost every social safety net removed or severely cut back, all our basic utility rates unilaterally raised, and so on. And still in Barbados our unemployment rate is at 12.1%.
We have to start rebuilding this country, so that a lot of those people temporarily on the government payrolls can be released but probably find new jobs that are really producing something.
The trade-offs may include having our debt-rating lowered, but that might only be for a time, because if we set a confident pace in the regeneration of our country’s assets, although our debt will also increase, it will create the boost that will bring back confidence to the market.
We cannot do it alone, using T-Bill or NIS funds.
But we can do it, and the hospital is one good way to start.
.jpg)