Senator: Where is $2B in health surcharge?

An Independent Senator wants to know what becomes of the $100 million taken from people’s wages every year as health surcharge. In reply a Government minister has said this sum is peanuts compared to what the Government pays to fund the health service.

The exchange took place in the Senate last Thursday evening during debate on the Finance Bill 2004. Independent Senator Parvatee Anmolsingh-Mahabir noted that the Bill would increase the penalty on employers for late submission of health surcharge payments to the Government, but she wondered what would become of the money. “For 20 years the working public has been paying hundreds of millions of dollars, every year filling the coffers of the various governments. Yet there has been no major improvement in the delivery of medical services to the citizens of our country.”

When people visited hospital, she said, they faced problems like a shortage of nurses, doctors, pharmacists, dieticians and technicians. “We hear of shortages of medicine, ambulances without life-saving equipment, millions of dollars of equipment being left idle because of lack of repairs or maintenance, and various units closed in the hospitals. “What is happening with the funds collected under the health surcharge? How is this fund utilised?” Over the past 20 years, said Anmolsingh-Mahabir, the Government had collected $2,221 million.

She listed the money collected for health surcharge for each year from 1984 to 2003 as respectively: $63M, $106M, $96M, $108M, $92M, $92M, $92M, $96M, $85M, $104M, $98M, $106M, $131M, $127M, $116M, $122M, $149M, $151M, $137M, and $132M. The Senator declared: “What has the public received in return? A health service that is almost in shambles!” With $100 million being collected annually, she said, the public had expected improved health services.  Anmolsingh-Mahabir urged: “There must be some accountability to the public as to how this money is being spent, especially since the Ministry of Health also receives allocation from the national budget. The public needs answers. We want to hear them tonight.”

In reply Junior Minister of Finance, Conrad Enill, said the health surcharge collection was dwarfed by the sum which the Government alloted to the Ministry of Health. Enill said: “Last year we approved $1,263,076,296 to the Ministry of Health, as really the cost of health care in this country.”  He compared this $1,263 million subvention to the $100 million in average health charge collected annually. Enill said: “The health surcharge is simply one revenue measure that goes into the Consolidated Fund, but we still had to supplement that by over one billion dollars just to deal with the whole question of health care in Trinidad and Tobago.”