Let’s face it, our healthcare situation is an unmitigated disaster. This is due not to the unstinting efforts of our doctors, nurses and health personnel, who have to deal with it, but to the scandals, inefficiency and corruption surrounding our health services.

We Maltese have paid an astronomical price for the Machiavellian sale of our three hospitals by corrupt politicians and their cronies and, this, not only in financial terms. The direct result of this disgusting sale is that our only public hospital, Mater Dei, cannot cope with the needs of the truly sick requiring hospital care.

Consequently, on July 12, the whole system finally broke down. We were informed that our government is now forced to issue an urgent call to outsource emergency care. Let us not forget the all-important premise: our patients deserve the very best care.

This new announcement calls for some answers to the following: Is there a holistic plan behind this urgent call? Which private entities have been consulted beforehand in order to determine what each of them exactly can handle? Are the medical personnel who will man these new emergency hubs trained in emergency medicine? Won’t farming out the emergency services still cause a bottleneck when these same patients are sent back to hospital for admission?

Regarding the financial costs that, ultimately, the taxpayer will have to face, can the minister tell us the difference in cost between a patient using Mater Dei emergency and the projected cost of the same patient using the private sector for the same condition? Is there an audit system in place to keep the private sector accountable so that taxpayers are not charged for unnecessary investigations?

Or is this going to mean that the taxpayer will continue forking out even more money to make up for the government’s deficiencies and the national theft from our coffers that went to line foreign and local pockets? Hasn’t the Steward/Vitals debacle taught us that accountability and transparency should be the cornerstone of any private/public partnership?

If this were not enough, in the past few months we have discovered, to our horror, that a section of the most vulnerable and defenceless people on these islands, the severely disabled, were cheated by, yet again, corrupt politicians and their cronies, out of money that should rightfully go to them.

Again, these stolen monies run into millions, our millions, taken out of the taxes honest citizens pay. The fact that some of the people who benefitted from this scandalous fraud are people with very low incomes is no excuse. It just shows up a government, which has the audacity to call itself ‘socialist’ (having totally forgotten what socialist ideology is all about), that has not really taken care of the proper, fair, transparent distribution of wealth.

Like the hospital scandal, that of fraudulent certification is reaching much larger proportions than it was first thought. We were first informed that the people who benefitted from it were being taken to court and given suspended sentences. This means that these people were obliged to pay back to the State the sums they had taken, which were not rightfully theirs. Yet, three weeks before elections, it would seem that the president of the republic was forced into giving a presidential pardon to these fraudsters. Does this mean that if these people do not pay, they will not face any consequence because they are pardoned? Is the ministry which oversaw the fraud the same one that is tasked to oversee the payments?

Why is it in Robert Abela’s interest to get Chris Fearne out of the country as soon as possible?- Vicki Ann Cremona

Have any conditions been laid down for a pardon to be granted? If justice is to prevail, the pardon should be given solely if additional information, previously undocumented, is provided, which should lead to new prosecutions of those who were behind this fraud.

Or are we to understand that, to secure votes, our government has cunningly waived the payments due by these people, which should go to the disabled who should have got the money in the first place? If this is the case, then the honest taxpayer continues to be cheated and the “culture of impunity”, so rightly denounced by the Chamber of Commerce, is not only encouraged but systematically cultivated.

The perpetrators? Our dishonest, unscrupulous politicians and their cronies. The victims? Apart from the truly sick, all Maltese and Gozitans of goodwill.

Oh, and by the way, has anyone thought of offering a public apology to those doctors whose names were fraudulently put on those certificates?

The cherry on the cake was certainly Robert Abela’s effort to pressure the courts into speeding up procedures in order to clear former health minister Chris Fearne, in the short space of two weeks so that he can be nominated as a European commissioner.

This is really a case of “some pigs being more equal than others” (‘pigs’ is George Orwell’s term, not mine). So, whereas any Maltese or Gozitan having to face court has to wait months, if not years, for their cases to be judged, because the courts are (wilfully?) deprived of sufficient competent personnel, it seems to be in Abela’s interest to make a former minister not only jump the queue  but be absolved, all in the space of two weeks.

Abela seems to forget that Fearne is not only facing serious charges but, it would appear, is a victim himself, of the cabal of thieves and fraudsters he was close to and went out of his way to protect and who felt no scruple in framing him.

Abela’s unreasonable pressure begs the question: Why is it in his interest to get Fearne, who could have been prime minister instead of him, out of the country as soon as possible?

What other price do justice and integrity have to pay in this country?

Vicki Ann Cremona is president of Repubblika.