What has become as clear as the Belizean skies is that our national health system has failed those most in need of its protection – the poor.
A reader has called for a commission of inquiry into the tragic death of Baby Jones, which occurred 9 days ago, last Tuesday.
The call, we think, is timely and needful. Our terrible health system, to be sure, was inherited by the incumbent UDP, but 15 months into their administration, it is too late to blame former Prime Minister Said Musa and the PUP.
The truth of the matter is that from the Hondo to the Sarstoon, from east to west, the poor citizens of this nation have suffered substandard health services, while millions have been spent on “more important” projects.
We speak here not only of lack of medicines, lack of attention, lack of compassion, lack of equipment and lack of medical expertise, but of unforgivable situations where the poor have died because of the lack of adequate medical care.
Politicians are a callous breed, we know, but the silence from the Barrow administration is deafening. We have dealt before with the horror of a mother delivering her baby in a hospital run by a cruel and uncaring staff, and the subsequent, unnecessary, heart-rending death of her baby.
The many letters to Amandala have indicated that many readers share the mother’s and father’s grief, and the belief that the infant’s death should not be in vain.
The many letters also document the hitherto unrevealed suffering of the poor, across the nation, victims of a health care policy which almost totally ignores them.
Not only has the Prime Minister, the Minister of Health and the government’s top bureaucrat in the Ministry of Health all failed to address the nation on this miserable and embarrassing failure of our health system, but these gentlemen, by their silence, appear to have given tacit support to the fallacy, born of desperation by the authorities at the Karl Heusner, that the mother, in effect, killed her own child.
On Saturday, May 23, embattled former South Korean president Roh Moo, 62, jumped to his death while hiking in the mountains behind his rural home in South Korea. Why? He, who had campaigned, and won his office on claims of honesty, had been found to have behaved dishonestly while in office.
Moo could not take the shame. He committed suicide.
We do not ask any one of the relevant authorities to commit suicide. We do not even ask for a resignation, the first refuge of an honest man, or woman. We merely ask to take responsibility for a health system in shambles, and the cruel, unnecessary death of an innocent infant.
The letter writer has asked for a commission of inquiry. But the Belizean people have lost faith in commissions of inquiry. In its stead, is “mea culpa” so hard to admit, we ask?
Apparently. It is easier to blame the mother; it is always easier for weaklings to blame someone else. Is this what our politicians and bureaucrats have come to – blaming a powerless, desperate woman for the inadequacies and deficiencies of a health system apparently built to kill the poor?
There is a saying: what goes around, comes around. Wait and see.