Barbadians returning home to live should be made to pay towards their health care rather than receiving it for free.
That is the suggestion of Member of Parliament for St Philip North Dr Sonia Browne, who was speaking on the Barbados Medical Products Bill, 2026, in the House of Assembly yesterday.
Browne acknowledged that she will probably get some “lashes” from the public in relation to the payment proposals.
“Right now the private service contributes to their drugs in terms of dispensing fee and so on, but we still have a big gap in the public sector, for instance, like polyclinics . . . . There are many people who enter the polyclinic for medication – a lot of them returning nationals that get their pensions from overseas, never contributed to our system, never paid NIS (National Insurance) in our system, but are happy to sit down with a book in the polyclinics for hours to get free medication that somebody else pays for,” she said.
Browne, a former minister of state in the Ministry of Health with responsibility for the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH), reasoned that her proposal was only fair and it would lift some of the cost of the health care burden.
‘Only fair’
“I think it is time, as I said with the exceptions, that some of these individuals are required to contribute to the cost of drugs. It is only fair, and it can lend to less burden on it, and hundreds of people visit the polyclinic on a daily basis.
“It would lend to the burden of the medication, the cost could go to some other part in medicine, but I think it is about time that we have a look at that, or relook at it, so that they will lend to the cost of it,” the medical doctor said.
The legislation is paving the way for the establishment of the Barbados Medical Products Regulatory Authority, to oversee the regulation, licensing, monitoring and quality control of medicines and other medical products to be manufactured here.
Deputy Prime Minister Santia Bradshaw shunned the payment issues.
“I think there is value in letting people know what the cost is to the country . . . , but I will not engage in an exercise of insisting on people paying for things for which, on many a day, they do not feel that it is worthy of that payment,” she told colleagues.
Rather, said Bradshaw, they should be looking to “place the same emphasis, the same role, initiative and the energy into making sure that the day-to-day things that affect the ordinary Barbadian in our health care system, that those things are equally front of mind and not simply the semantics that we so often like to share, not only in this place, but in other places as well.”
Bradshaw, who is also the minister of environment, national beautification and fisheries, pointed to initiatives coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic like the delivery of medication, rather than going back to having patients waiting for hours in long lines at the QEH’s pharmacy.
“Perhaps we need to go back to the drawing board to see whether those facilities that arose out of a crisis, whether some of those facilities can be extended, whether they can be improved [to accommodate] the little old ladies that I encounter that say they’ve been waiting from even two hours, sometimes, before the pharmacy opens”. ( AC)
