The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

Please publish the following letter, which was addressed to The Nassau Guardian in reference to its Editorial of the 16th May, 2015.

EDITOR, The Guardian.

Your editorial of the  May 16, in which you advanced the idea that NHI cannot be afforded and will “seal the fate” of the PLP, was disappointing and, frankly disingenuous as well.

You state: “Many Bahamians think health reform is important. But they also know they cannot afford to give one more dollar to the state. If they do they will be unable to pay their electricity bills, school fees for their children and their mortgages.”

It is interesting that you omit from that list of important expenses the most important of them all: healthcare and illness. For important as the others may be, I have never once heard of a Bahamian family being forced into the indignity of a public cookout to pay for private school fees, a mortgage or an electricity bill.

When a government takes a portion of the national income to spend on (and lessen) an inevitable and universal cost that all will incur, then to call it a “tax” is to engage in semantic scare tactics worthy of American Republicans.

What you characterise as “giving” money to the state, a more objective observer would see as participating in a savings plan for an event that will predictably, inevitably come due in every one of our lives.

This issue is above politics. It is regrettable that Pindling and then Ingraham and then Christie and then Ingraham all came and went without giving Bahamians the universal healthcare that this country can easily afford if it has its priorities right (are we poorer than Costa Rica?). If Christie fails to introduce it now, he will not only discredit his party. He will delay and set back the country’s social development once again on account of political scaremongering of the kind seen in your editorial.

I would respectfully also suggest that when the Guardian lends its sagacity to the issue of NHI, it at least preface its editorials with a declaration of its parent company’s involvement in the private insurance industry.

ANDREW ALLEN

Nassau,

May 17, 2015.