Deputy P.U.P. leader has different ideas on U.H.S. deal

They say that the Peoples United Party is working to end its internal squabbling and pull together into a unified electoral fighting force … but you’d never know it by reading the Belize Times. In another one of his mystifying columns, First Deputy Party Leader Godfrey Smith not only revealed some startling new details of the deal to take over Universal Health Services, but also proposed to do it without consulting the people who must make it work. Writing in the issue dated December twenty-fourth, Smith carefully explains why Cabinet saw fit to take over two-thirds ownership of U.H.S. and integrate it into the national health system. The new wrinkle he adds however, is that after Belmopan satisfies the Belize Bank’s thirty million dollar outstanding loan with a comparably valued chunk of land at Northern Ambergis Caye, U.H.S. would then go back to the bank to borrow an additional fifteen million. Of that amount four million would pay off the principal of the twelve million dollar D.F.C. loan and D.F.C. would write off the remaining eight million in interest due. The remaining eleven million dollars of borrowed money would go to meet other outstanding U.H.S. debts and help service the new loan. With collateral for the fresh debt being all the U.H.S. assets, the possibility would exist that if the hospital once again could not make its loan payments, the Belize Bank could foreclose and we’d be back in the same mess we are now–only instead of government owning the U.H.S. assets, they would belong to the bank. As for the newly articulated plans of the Ministry of Health, Smith says forget about any consultations: I quote: “The trial balloon should be exploded. The task force dismantled. The Cabinet should sit for one day with the relevant accounting, medical and legal experts available in the corridor and determine the structure of new U.H.S. and the framework of the new public-private sector collaboration.”