And on the other side of the political color spectrum, Patrick Faber, drew the outrage of the Belize Emergency Response Team for comments he made yesterday during the UDP's press conference on the COVID public health crisis.
BERT is insisting that Faber misspoke when he recounted an incident in which his mother, who recently recovered from the COVID virus, needed emergency transport to the hospital. According to Faber, BERT asked him to pay several hundred dollars for the service. Here are those comments:
Hon. Patrick Faber - Leader of the Opposition
"When it is that I realized that my mother needed to be hospitalized, of course, the problem became how are we going to get her to the hospital? And when we called BERT ambulance, the cost to transport my mother from home to the hospital was $350. Imagine persons out there who are not earning at all. They don't have an income, and they are asked to go to the hospital. They are in their homes. They can't breathe. You're feeling weak. You certainly cannot walk. And what happens? If you can't pay for that ambulance service to come."
"Then that person, that ill person will get into a car with a person who is potentially not ill. I've heard stories of the entire family arriving in the KHMH parking lot in a van to bring 1 elderly COVID positive patient. Because it's the granny or the matriarch or somebody seriously loved by the family, and all those persons are contracting the virus. Or you'll have a person getting into a taxi cab, not telling the taxi man that you have COVID, and then, there is the spreading of the virus. This is how we've gotten to the stage where we are at. So, we make the plea again to the government to ensure there's transportation for COVID-positive patients to and from the hospital, or to and from the clinics or wherever they're going for treatment."
In a press release sent yesterday, the BERT said, quote, "...BERT refutes the claims that patients are denied services based on affordability. This statement is absolutely untrue.
As our financial records illustrate, more than 50% of our services rendered go unpaid. BERT perseveres to respond to all calls despite our limited means. In 2020, BERT wrote to the then Minister of Health Hon. Pablo Marin alerting the Ministry of Health that BERT was facing severe financial constraints due to the COVID-19 impact on the economy, and loss of ancillary revenues. Despite this fact, the Barrow Administration chose to cut BERT's subvention by a whopping 40% in 2020… This overnight decision was catastrophic to our operations." End quote.
