The health care services are currently under severe scrutiny following reports that new and expensive anti-cancer drugs are not being made available on our national health service.
The prevention, early detection and updated treatment of cancer in all its forms loom large in the programming of any modern public health service. The country is well aware that cancer is one of the captains of the men of death accounting for some 25 per cent of annual national mortality. However, it needs underlining that a public health care service that is unable to meet the challenge it poses cannot make claim to any form of excellence.
A modern efficient cancer service is a complex, highly costly institution entailing the use of a multitude of highly trained and varied medical, nursing and paramedical personnel equipped with expensive and sophisticated apparatus, and organised within a wide and mutually supportive structure. The cost of such a service is enormous. Like the cost of some other commodities the likelihood is that the cost will continue to increase, with the consequence of a very serious threat that it will sooner or later become unsustainable.
A recent article made similar remarks when it questioned the practice of blanket public health services free of charge, stating that "at this rate the much vaunted health services will not be sustainable. Providing health care services free of charge for everyone in all cases is beyond any government's capability".
Recent pronouncements in Parliament in the course of the Budget debate not unreasonably aggravate concern over our ability to go on funding our national health service as a completely free service, while adding the further burden of a breast screening programme so limited as not to be cost-effective.
Dr Gonzi has declared that the national health service will remain completely free while we can afford it.
He is carefully hedging his bets in the face of the Opposition's outright statement that Labour will keep the national health service free.
All this is partisan gamesmanship before a general election at the expense of honest, objective thinking and a serious and complex problem.