P.M. comments on crime, the economy and N.H.I.
With the usually raucous budget debate set for Friday, Prime Minister Said Musa spent today’s lunch hour doing some warm up exercises. The occasion was an address to the Belize Business Bureau at the Biltmore Plaza. Focussing on crime, the economy, and health reform, the P.M. spoke from notes and answered questions from the audience. On crime, he pointed to the problem of deportees…and how they’ve changed the equation in law enforcement.
Prime Minister Said Musa
“It’s not all of them, but a vast majority of these deportees are hardened sophisticated criminals who went to the best schools in Los Angeles, L.A. Central. And they come back here now, and they come with new techniques that our poor police can’t cope with often times; so it’s a big problem. What we need to do as a first step I believe, before we can get a response out of the U.S. government with the region, is if we can work out with the U.S. authorities a prisoner exchange agreement, as we have with Mexico. If they’re any Belizeans still serving time in the U.S. that the U.S. wish to deport, then they should hand them over to the Belizean authorities to go straight to jail to serve the rest of their time. But we cannot implement that unless you have a prisoner exchange agreement.”
On the economy, Musa addressed the possibility of dollarisation. In direct contrast to Opposition Leader Dean Barrow, who this morning told radio listeners that it’s a concept worth exploring, the Prime Minister concluded that all that glitters is not necessarily gold.
Prime Minister Said Musa
“My position on dollarisation is, I have not seen it work anywhere. I know they sight Ecuador and Salvador, I believe the jury is still out as far as those two countries are concerned, the jury is out. Personally, I don’t see how dollarisation is going to help a country like Belize, and I’ll tell you why I see it this way. No matter what currency you use, if you are not creating the wealth to be able to pay for the goods and services that you need you will still have a problem; whether it’s in U.S. dollars of Belize dollars. We must go to the root of the issue, not the symptom. And that’s why I believe that dollarisation as a panacea is a myth. The truth is, we must increase our productive capacity.”
A somewhat less clear-cut issue is that of National Health Insurance. News 5’s Ann-Marie Williams tried to pin the P.M. down on exactly where N.H.I. now stands.
Prime Minister Said Musa
“First of all, there are at least three things that we need to put in place. One, is to extend the delivery of services to the whole country, in other words, we need to have the capacity, the facilities. Secondly, we need to ensure that we put in place a financing mechanism that is acceptable and will meet with some support; I’m speaking as a politician as well. And thirdly, there are still things in the pilot project that we need to analyse in order to bring down the cost of the health services, and to cut out any waste and abuse in any established system that we may put in place.”
Ann-Marie Williams
“So what can we actually say now? Is it going to happen or it’s not going to happen?”
Prime Minister Said Musa
“It’s going to happen, but you’re asking to tie me down to a specific date and I can’t give you that, because all this work is being carried out. It will happen, trust me, it will happen. I’m speaking for the government, the People’s United Party government, I’m telling you that we are committed to N.H.I. We have done a lot of studies, and indeed the last government, the UDP administration, they started this whole health reform project, I have to give that to them and N.H.I. was in the cards as well for that. Maybe they didn’t call it N.H.I., but a cost recovery system, everybody, every government, every politician if they’re honest to the people, must lay it out. But there has to be cost recovery for us to have a better system and a sustainable one.”
Ann-Marie Williams
“Are you at all concerned as to where the money will come from?”
Prime Minister Said Musa
” I believe the money is being spent right now, it’s just that people don’t realise they’re spending it, because they’re not spending it every week out of their pay or in a tax form. But, every time they go to the doctor they’re spending it. What the studies show, is that Belizeans are spending out of their pockets, something like forty million dollars on health. So what we are coming up with, is a system that will pool the resources, that you spend less and get a better product; that is what it’s all about.”
Some thirty-seven thousand Belizeans living on the southside of the Belize District have registered for N.H.I., although only twenty-one thousand have accessed health care under the pilot project.
