by Rick Lowe
Since August 2006 The National Coalition for Health Care Reform (Coalition) has been attempting to obtain meaningful data from the Bahamas government on their proposed National Health Insurance scheme (NHI) to offer constructive criticism.
When the government started to “feel the heat” of the public debate, Dr. BJ Nottage, Senator and Minister of Health, invited the Coalition to take the debate out of the public domain and he would share the information being sought. Well BJ, as Dr. Nottage is affectionately known, deceived the Coalition into silence and to date has not provided the promised information.
Bear in mind BJ and his staff at the Ministry of Health have been meeting with groups all across the country to offer a public relations programme on how great the NHI scheme will be without providing substantive data on how the plan is structured or how they arrived their numbers or how it will be sustained.
They call this PR road show “consultation”.
But I digress.
Back to the Coalition.
The Coalition agreed to the government’s “code of silence” on the promise from BJ that the information requested in their “consultation” would be provided forthwith. To date the information has not been provided.
What has been provided is a an indignant and offensive letter from BJ that still does not provide the information but chastises members of the Coalition for exercising their Constitutional right to free speech.
Accompanying the Nottage tirade of January 26, 2007 is a copy of a letter to Dr. Robin Roberts, Chairman of the Coalition, dated November 14, 2006 that lists some 29 questions and comments for the Coalition to answer but no responses to the Coalitions questions. Quite a contradiction to what this blogger and many on the Coalition envisioned. In addition, none of the Coalition members I have spoken with have seen this letter before Tuesday, February 6, 2007. Curious indeed.
One thing that is patently clear is that BJ and the Government suffer from what Thomas Sowell calls The Vision of the Anointed.
Sowell suggests that:
In the anointed we find a whole class of supposedly “thinking-people” who do remarkably little thinking about substance and a great deal of verbal expression. In order that this relatively small group of people can believe themselves wiser and nobler than the common herd, we have adopted policies which impose heavy costs on millions of other human beings, not only in taxes but also in lost jobs, social disintegration, and a loss of personal safety. Seldom have so few cost so much to so many.
This will undoubtedly be the case with the NHI scheme as the evidence from many other countries indicates.
To be continued.
I thought all of our Politicians think they are anointed Rick ! I have some new for them, they take a crap the same as you & me !