DR CARLOS CHASE, president of the Barbados Association of Medical Practitioners (BAMP), recently went on the public record and warned Barbadians to expect to be charged hefty medical fees by himself and other similar specialist doctors!
Yet, this is the same Dr Carlos Chase who is urging the Barbadian people to sell their nation’s only public hospital – our Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH) – to corporate Barbados and doctors like him so that they might run it like “a hotel”.
It was at a town hall meeting held at Queen’s College on Tuesday, February 9, that Dr Chase defiantly declared that he had to bear sizeable insurance costs, and therefore “if . . . you visit me or do a delivery, you can expect that I’m not going to charge you peanuts”.
I cannot speak for the rest of my fellow working-class and middle-class Barbadians, but as far as I am concerned, Dr Carlos Chase is not the [one] I would wish to have exercising ownership and control over the only major general hospital in my country.
As far as I am concerned, nothing can be better than to have the only major general hospital in Barbados owned by the Government and people of our country.
Minimalist health care
As an amateur historian, I am only too well aware of the abysmal and minimalist health care that was available to the masses of black and poor white Barbadian people until, with the advent of universal adult suffrage in the 1950s, the various black-controlled governments of Barbados radically expanded the state-owned public health care system, inclusive of the establishment of the QEH in 1964.
Indeed, I maintain that the experience of the entire world over the past 100 years has demonstrated, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the cornerstone of any effective national health care system is the public, state-owned general hospital that provides citizens with a comprehensive range of free (or taxpayer-supported) medical services and facilities under one roof.
We Barbadians already possess such a system in the form of our state-owned QEH, and we would be fools to listen to the siren voices of the likes of Dr Carlos Chase and give it away.
Whatever problems and deficiencies currently plague the QEH can be remedied without privatising our hospital.
I am therefore calling on all sensible Barbadians, and particularly on the mass membership of the Barbados Association of Medical Practitioners, to completely disavow Dr Carlos Chase and his backward ideas!
– DAVID COMISSIONG