UPDATED: Healthcare fees - Government reacts to new MLP charge

Labour leader Alfred Sant insisted this morning it should be Dr Gonzi and not himself who should apologise to the people on what was said on healthcare fees.

Dr Sant said at a press conference in Gozo that it was ridiculous to argue, as the PN was doing, that a civil servant could misinterpret or imagine the December 2004 report he revealed last week which said that the Cabinet agreed in principle to introduce healthcare fees but they “should not be introduced for the moment because of political underpinnings.” Therefore, rather than apologise, as Dr Gonzi had demanded, it should be Dr Gonzi himself who should apologise for trying to mislead the country.

Dr Sant said that furthermore, a ‘Preliminary national report on healthcare and long term care’ submitted to the EU by the Ministry of Health in April 2005 as part of an EU-wide discussion on health costs, proposed the establishment of a national health fund that could be a sub-fund of the Consolidated Fund financed in part from social security health contributions. The report said that other potential sources of income for the fund could include hypothecated taxes, government grants or “miscellaneous fees”.

The MLP leader asked that these ‘miscellaneous fees’ could be, and who would pay them. Would it be that elderly woman waiting for years for a knee replacement?

This document, Dr Sant said, further showed that the government had not washed its hands of the imposition of healthcare fees.

The government in a reaction to Dr Sant’s press conference said the report Preliminary National Report on Health Care and Long-Term Care was public and had long been on the website of the health ministry.

The government said that while Dr Sant tried to imply that there existed some plan for the introduction of new fees, the miscellaneous fees he had referred to were nothing more than fees paid by foreigners and companies who received a service from the Maltese health service. Such fees had been part of the budget for a long time, even when Dr Sant was prime minister.

The government recalled that the first tax it had repealed was the tax on medicine prescriptions introduced by Dr Sant himself. The facts, the government said, spoke for themselves.