The title is rhetorical. The Nationalist Party is trying to project itself as an alternative government and “a positive” government force by promising material benefits to the electors. Given that there are currently issues at the general hospital related to the usual problems of lack of space and excessive admissions, the Nationalist Party is taking the opportunity to promise a better health service.
People who are not so old, but are old enough to be my age, remember a time when the public health service was in a state of abandonment under consecutive Nationalist administrations, despite all the pomp and the propaganda made about the construction of a new hospital. People waited endlessly on waiting lists and also for serious operations and the situation today is by far much better than it was back then. There was a time when people actually risked going blind due to being refused an eye cataract operation – these were common stories during the last Nationalist administration which we stopped hearing during the Labour administrations that followed.
This is not to say that Labour has made everything perfect in the health sector. On the contrary, Joseph Muscat abused of the health sector to concoct the greatest fraud in our political history, raided public funds which were meant for the health sector to enrich himself and ignored important aspects of the health sector such as mental health.
On the other hand, no one can deny the reality that Labour government’s welfare state is very strong and the government doesn’t put restrictions on its health expenditure which is increasing year on year. There are many particular problems which are not being addressed, such as genetic rare diseases, which can also be very expensive and particular to cure.
The Nationalist Party would do much better to highlight these lacunas and pressure the government to address them, effectively changing people’s lives from the Opposition benches. If the Nationalist Party is going to present itself as the better welfare state party, I think it’s going to have a lot of problems to convince many electors about this promise, not to mention its material challenges.
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