ON TUESDAY, JULY 18, in one section of the press, the Democratic Labour Party (DLP) presented a full page advertisement, Part 1 of its FACTS series on health care. In one line of the article, the DLP points out that the Government spent $450 million on health care in 2016/2017.
Later in the same article, in a table documenting the “recurrent health spending by sources of financing” the figure recorded in the table under Government’s spending is $405.2 million.
So where has the $44.8 million gone? Are we just supposed to ignore this sum, as the authors of the article have apparently done? Is the “disappearance” of large sums of money to be treated as a “government business as usual” procedure? Is this what happened in previous years?
At best, this may represent poor arithmetic skills, and a sloppy approach by the authors to reviewing their own public relations effort. At worst, it justifies the recent call by Professor Sir Frank Alleyne for a Contractor General.
Also important in assessing whether the sum ($450 million or $405.2 million) that the Government spends on health is being well spent (or otherwise) is an assessment of what is happening with the national health.
The annual reports of the Chief Medical Officer (CMO) give us a limited view of the national health picture, and also provide some important national medical statistics and trends.
Unfortunately, the most recent publicly available CMO’s report stops at the year 2009. [It may be coincidental that the DLP was first elected in 2008.] This means that objective data on our national health picture has not been made available to those outside of the Ministry of Health, for the last seven years.
In 2015, the results of the Health Of The Nation study were published. This study, which was commissioned by the Ministry of Health and looked at the health of Barbadian adults aged 25 years and over, was conducted by the Chronic Disease Research Centre (CDRC), in conjunction with the Faculty of Medicine, UWI, Cave Hill.
The authors of the study (which included a senior official in the Ministry of Health) concluded that “urgent action is required to address the low levels of healthy behavioural risk and high levels of biological risk present in the Barbadian adult population”.
However, we are still waiting on a public comment from the Ministry of Health on how/when/where/what urgent action will be implemented to improve the health of Barbadians, given the magnitude of “poor health” identified in the study, and perhaps to lower health care costs as well.
The DLP should also tell us what is happening to the recommendations that were received during the five town hall meetings held early in 2016 on health care sector financing reform.
This follows comments made during the recent national budget debate that the National Social Responsibility Levy (NSRL), recently increased by 400 per cent, was designed to provide for education and health. It was noticed that, one week after the NSRL was implemented on July 1, 2017, the Minister of Health “floated” the concept of a national health levy.
At least we can speculate on what the Minister of Health thinks about the likelihood of the NSRL being able to fix the financial woes associated with health.
One looks forward to the DLP presenting additional “facts” on the actual spending in health, and supplying the statistics on our national health picture during the last eight years under their watch.
We may be able to see where the millions have “apparently disappeared”, where our health picture actually is, and where we are headed.
– DR COLIN ALERT
