The Specialty Hospital that government is trying to establish is a much-needed development initiative and it is good for all citizens. In the 2013 budget presentation, the opposition parties, A Partnership for National Unity (APNU) and Alliance For Change (AFC), voted against the initiative.
On December 12, the government presented a supplementary budget paper to provide funding to accelerate the construction of the hospital. Both APNU and AFC again voted against the project. But there was divine intervention. God really is on the side of the people of Guyana.
Had every AFC and APNU member voted, they would have had 32 votes, but APNU Member of Parliament (MP) Debra Backer was absent from that sitting. This meant that the People’s Progressive Party/ Civic (PPP/ C) had 32 votes and the opposition had 32 votes. When the vote was taken, however, the opposition had only 31 votes.
God’s intervention?
APNU MP Volda Lawrence was absent during voting and the budget was approved. Could it be that God decided to intervene on behalf of the Guyanese people? The Specialty Hospital must not be a negotiable project. Every Guyanese must embrace its establishment.
Small, developing countries like Guyana will never be able to afford a hospital that can provide routine high quality tertiary care services such as cancer treatment, heart and brain surgeries, transplants and other interventions.
Guyana’s Specialty Hospital is designed to attract people from other countries to come to Guyana for such services, rather than having to go to distant Asian locations. While people from outside will pay regular prices for such services, resident Guyanese would be assisted to obtain services at an affordable cost.
Government will negotiate a discounted price that all Guyanese will benefit from. Government will also provide support to those Guyanese citizens who cannot afford even the discounted prices. In this way, all citizens will benefit from the investment.
It is shameless that any politician will vote against a project that is good for Guyana, simply to ensure that the PPP/ C does not get credit for such a development. Anything that is good for Guyana should have the support of all politicians.
But APNU and AFC consistently have voted against the welfare of the nation and the interest of the Guyanese people. This is but only one example of how reckless the opposition is, as they trade good sense and decency for recklessness and indecent sabotaging of development in Guyana. They have demonstrated time and again, a propensity to hold Guyana hostage in their shameless efforts to grab political power.
The opposition also threatened to vote against a budgetary allocation to expand the cardiac care unit at the Georgetown Public Hospital which presently caters for patents benefiting from heart surgeries at the Caribbean Heart Institute (CHI).
More than 300 Guyanese citizens are alive today because of life-saving heart surgeries at CHI. Persons who have accessed CHI services are Guyanese citizens of every race, religion and from all political background.
Access
The opposition wanted to vote against the provisions to expand the Coronary Care Unit (CCU) because they say CHI is a greedy institution that only caters for the rich.
But they should speak to the large number of pensioners, cane cutters, farmers and labourers who were provided with support to get services.
Had CHI not been here, many of these persons would not have had access to such life-saving interventions.
Because of CHI, Guyanese citizens of all walks of life have access to services that they would not have been able to afford, even with government help to go abroad. In the seven years in which CHI has been operating as part of a public-private-partnership, Guyana has saved more than Gy$ 1 billion in medical costs, if citizens had to travel abroad for those services.
The partnership between the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC) and CHI has more than justified the government’s bold initiative to bring better health care to the people.
This is the kind of further upgrading of health services that the Specialty Hospital promises. If Guyana saved more than Gy$ 1 billion in seven years with CHI providing only one kind of service in Guyana, how much more would be saved from the Specialty Hospital? Politicians should stop playing games with people’s lives. Every MP should be asked how they voted on the Specialty Hospital and we should judge them, not from their words but from their action.
Let’s look at how they vote whenever it comes to anything that directly benefits Guyanese citizens.
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