Barrow: Govt. must bite the bullet

One of the most anticipated aspects of the budget was the future of National Health Insurance. While the Prime Minister has always been N.H.I.’s greatest champion, his two-year attempt at radical health care reform fared no better than Hillary Clinton’s. Despite this morning’s rhetoric, it now seems that N.H.I. is dead on arrival.

Prime Minister Said Musa

“The N.H.I. as I said today is central to our programme for health reform and we’re not backing off from that. In fact, we believe that we need to move ahead with that. But I did point out that before we can implement N.H.I. we need to ensure that people can get the benefits of N.H.I., which means that we have to carry out, continue to carry out the upgrading of facilities countrywide, in all the districts. Secondly, it is a fact that the macro-economic stability has been affected by the things I have mentioned and we need to get back our fiscal position in sync, in balance. And thirdly, until we have this kind of monetary and fiscal stability… After consulting quite frankly with business, with labour and our own colleagues, representatives, the feelings are that the time is not appropriate to implement any kind of additional, whether it be a payroll deduction or whether it be a kind of tax, in order to earmark finance for the health sector for the N.H.I., now is not the appropriate time.”

Dean Barrow

“The payment option that was being proposed by the Prime Minister was an alternative to his original thought, which was direct pay-sheet deductions. The option of an increase in sales tax and business tax is less harmful I think than his original proposal. The bottom line is though by hook or by crook, one way or another, N.H.I. has to be funded. They’ve already gone ahead with the pilot project, they’ve raised people’s expectations, they’ve gotten the international funding agencies involved. They can’t turn back now, they’ve got to bite the political bullet.”