I would like to make some general comments on our health service based on my experience as one of its former departmental chairmen and also as a former management board director of a British Healthcare Trust, which was one of three pilot sites entrusted with costing all NHS hospital services.

The local notion that medical public-private partnerships do not make financial sense, because the public sector is cheaper than the private one, is based on fiction.

To correctly cost the services at Mater Dei Hospital would require a reputable accountancy firm to input not only all salaries, building maintenance and equipment servicing contracts, water, electricity and telephone rates but also the capital costs of the building (what the interest payments would be on the bank loan to buy the land and build the hospital).

Unless we have such level of accounting, the claim that it’s cheaper to treat patients at Mater Dei than privately is not credible.

Sweden, the spiritual home of socialist medicine, has brought in (as reported in The Economist) private companies to run large chunks of its health services because these were considered to deliver results more efficiently and also cheaper.

Furthermore, health systems where service providers (individuals or firms) are remunerated on a fee-per-item-of-service basis usually have no waiting lists, unlike others that are engaged on fixed-salary contracts.