Pao­lo Ker­na­han

The Min­is­ter of Health, Dr Fuad Khan, this week lobbed a grenade of a re­mark in­to the pow­der mag­a­zine that is the pub­lic do­main and sat back as the opin­ion bunker det­o­nat­ed in dev­as­tat­ing fash­ion.Tac­ti­cal­ly speak­ing, there was val­ue in his state­ment, but his ap­proach was more ra­di­a­tion ther­a­py rather than sur­gi­cal in­ter­ven­tion. Now that you've got a med­ley of mind-bog­gling mixed-metaphors to process (and an alarm­ing amount of al­lit­er­a­tion) let's take a clos­er look at the is­sue.

Dr Khan was blast­ed for sug­gest­ing that ab­di­ca­tion of our per­son­al re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for good health has in­ex­orably bur­dened the state. Peo­ple are too greedy, their ro­mance with fast food and fast livin' costs the State $5 bil­lion a year. The min­is­ter went on to sug­gest that pre­cious bed space in our health care in­sti­tu­tions is clut­tered with cit­i­zens who con­scious­ly make "three-piece" de­ci­sions about their lives. It was an im­pas­sioned but clear­ly mis­guid­ed un­der­es­ti­ma­tion of the com­plex­i­ty of the fail­ure of state health care.

Dr Bratt (a colum­nist with this news­pa­per and a neigh­bour of mine) quite right­ly point­ed out that blam­ing our face-stuf­fin' peo­ple for the hos­pi­tals' woes is un­fair. Dr Bratt sug­gest­ed ways the gov­ern­ment can ac­tive­ly pro­mote healthy lifestyles through ed­u­ca­tion cam­paigns as well as tax in­cen­tives for com­pa­nies im­port­ing gym equip­ment.

http://www.guardian.co.tt/dig­i­tal/new-mem­bers