David Burt, Kim Wilson, Rolfe Commissiong and their sidekicks in the Progressive Labour Party have kicked off an intense interest with their proposals to create socialised medicine in Bermuda in 2020 despite the opposition of virtually all of the medical profession, which includes general practitioners, specialists, surgeons, nurses, dentists, pharmacists and other health professionals. This will be a revolution in healthcare management by making everyone pay into a monetary pool that will be under the control of our politicians. The starting point of our political masters is that Bermuda, as a rich country, fails to provide adequate healthcare for those who are unable to bear the high costs of healthy living. This is a huge issue for those who cannot afford extensive medical insurance or, through failure of understanding, did not make adequate provision for medical catastrophes.That the medical profession in Bermuda has a long and distinguished history of helping the uninsured, often at its own expense, is ignored by our politicians. Their assumption seems to be the reverse, namely that medical professionals in Bermuda extract huge profits from the misery of the sick and that their evil practices need to be curbed. As a consequence, the existing medical arrangements require significant and radical reform, and the Government will determine henceforth a mechanism whereby medical costs will be cheaper and more widely available. Many Bermudians are unhappy with the existing hodgepodge of arrangements between private insurers, employers and healthcare providers, especially when insurance premiums are barely affordable to many, when there are complex regulations, and when there is a lack of financial transparency. Given this level of dissatisfaction, it is not difficult to understand why so many Bermudians are sympathetic to comprehensive healthcare reforms. To support this dissatisfaction, many articles and comments have been published in The Royal Gazette by leading politicians, and a major public meeting was held on November 26 to advise the public of the proposed reforms. Such reforms promise to make healthcare cheaper and more efficient, although it is never made clear how this would happen. However, what has been missing in the public discourse so far are the details of exactly how this new system is going to work on a day-to-day basis, and how the public will be able to discern the improvements in our medical care. What the public have been left with is a vague promise that in some unknown way, somehow the experts in government will transform our medical system into a paragon of healthcare virtue. This has not convinced Bermuda’s prison officers, who smell a rat. And it stinks. Bermudians are being asked, as an act of faith, to entrust our health and lives to political planners who believe that they are smarter, are better informed, and more moral than individual patients and professional medical staff. But is that true? Are Ms Wilson, Mr Commissiong and Mr Burt more moral, smarter, more ethical and better informed than our health professionals? Even to ask that question is to answer it in the negative. At least three more questions arise: • Can the Government realistically realise the objective of cheaper and better medical care, especially when no one else in the world has achieved this? • Should we, the public, take this as a matter of faith in the remarkable abilities of the people who populate the Bermuda Government at present? • Is the record of government competence such that reasonable people have confidence in the day-to-day management of the most important service to them? What has been missing from the public debates is how little attention has been paid to the actual experiences of countries with socialised medicine. All three politicians have concentrated on how benevolent the proposed new system will be to Bermudians without once drawing attention to the many failures that have occurred in countries that have socialised medicine. All of this, despite the failures having been given extensive international media coverage. One should not be at all surprised that the PLP government has been economical with the truth about what has occurred elsewhere, such as Britain’s National Health Service and its perpetual crises, because recognition of the flaws undermines its shaky case for change.Were the three leading political advocates to explore what really does happen in countries with government-sponsored health services such as in Britain, they would find that their rosy predictions of medical miracles are very different from the historical record, and that the record of allegedly giving high-quality healthcare to needy people is peppered with incompetence, scandal and death.To take one example. In one (out of 487) of the local NHS trusts in the English Midlands between 2004 and 2013, a scathing report, called the worst maternity scandal in the history of the NHS, revealed the avoidable deaths of 11 babies and one mother in a single hospital. Subsequent investigations showed that similar scandals existed in several other medical trusts.So what can I hear readers say?“That was then, this is now.” “You are quoting ancient history; what about the present?” Let me provide a more up-to-date account of how the British Government’s medical services treats ill people like dirt. The Daily Mail of November 29, 2019 reports that millions of patients in Britain struggle to get an appointment with a doctor. NHS data shows that there were 28,315 GPs in Britain, about one for every 2,200 people living there, but with the number of doctors falling by 330 a year. According to the Bermuda Government website, the number of physicians here compares favourably with the United States, Britain and Canada at approximately 2.7 physicians per 1,000. Bermuda has one GP for every 1,000 population, while the US has 0.3 per 1,000, Britain 0.8 and Canada 1.3 per 1,000. All across Britain, medical services are grappling with severe staff shortages of 105,000, plus another 122,000 staff shortages in social care. The report, in short, states that the NHS is a medical disgrace, but this is the system our political leaders are seeking to foist on the public of Bermuda.So the question arises, why do our Bermuda politicians want to move us in the direction of Britain, and elsewhere, by copying, in large part, their substandard or failed medical practices? Stick with me and I will try to answer that question.While it is tempting to conclude that these horrible cases, past and present, are an aberration and not a true reflection of the NHS, the truth is that negligence and awful performance are systemic problems in many government-run health systems such as France, USA and Canada. Alas, reports of terrible mismanagement in government healthcare in Britain, and elsewhere, are not at all unusual and there is an extensive literature on the subject.But back to Bermuda. The record of government mismanagement of sponsored activities such as education, public transportation and day-to-day financial management is legendary for its exposure of incompetence and contempt for the Bermuda taxpayer. One just has to go back to the Sage Commission Report of 2013 to see a huge catalogue of government mismanagement, or read even a small portion of the Auditor-General’s annual reports on government finances. To plan to entrust our health services and lives to an organisation that has failed dismally to run most of its operations in an efficient manner is a triumph of hope over experience. Government intervention is likely to create chaos, not improved healthcare, as we have seen in so many other government-managed projects. But let me now concentrate on the high quality and the administration of our existing health services. I have never heard of anyone being refused medical care either by a doctor or by the hospital because of a lack of funds, or for any other reason. I have never heard of anyone else making such a complaint. Indeed, the record of our medical and dental professions is one of providing first-class care, irrespective of financial ability to pay. Although not perfect, the healthcare system in Bermuda would stack up well against other advanced countries such as the USA.So why is the Government so adamant about reforming something that works reasonably well for all Bermudians?This brings me to what I think is the real reason why the Government is so eager to engage itself in our health service. It is not because there are significant flaws in the provision of healthcare to Bermudians. It is not because it is worried that I, and other Bermudians, am being misled by the medical professionals. It is not because there is a shortage of medical staff — compared with the US, Britain and Canada, our healthcare system comes at the top of healthcare league tables. Let me backtrack a little here. Everyone is familiar with magic shows where someone such as a conjuror brings forth a rabbit out of the hat having earlier shown the audience that there was nothing hidden in the hat. He fools the audience by distracting them, and when they are distracted, he places the rabbit in the hat. “Abracadabra”, he pulls out a rabbit out of the hat.The proponents of the new health system are fooling the Bermuda public in much the same manner as a magician. They are distracting our attention by falsely stating that the present system is failing Bermudians as patients and then they pull out the rabbit of radical medical reform. Why are they proposing reforms to an efficient medical system that will not improve the existing arrangements? In a word, power. When you control a health system, you control the people who are dependent on the health system, and that means everyone. The health proposals are nothing more than a power grab by politicians who wish to boss everyone around. That is the nature of political power. People such as Ms Wilson and Mr Commissiong, as well as the Premier, would have a significant voting hold over every Bermudian. This has been the ambition of many politicians since the dawn of time. Politicians such as Mao Tse Tung, Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin are simply extreme examples of those who revelled in their extensive power over other people. Political history is full of examples of those who led their people to disaster — Perón in Argentina, Papa Doc in Haiti, Maduro in Venezuela, and Bustamante in Jamaica are other lesser examples of power-grabbing politicians who ruined their countries. The people of Bermuda should not be fooled by these fake conjurors into believing that their proposed “reforms” will improve the health system of Bermuda. What it will undoubtedly improve is the ability of people such as Messrs Burt, Wilson and Commissiong to play around with the lives of other Bermudians. That means all of us.The Bermuda Government is inherently bad at predicting the future, managing big projects and accepting responsibility for its decisions. Bureaucrats and the army of other supposed experts on Parliament Street suffer from what is called the “fatal conceit” that they have more than adequate skills and information to plan for society’s welfare. It’s a conceit because no one has enough information to be a competent central planner, as many economic writers have explained. Political power is not wisdom.I referred earlier in this essay to the tragedy that took place in England when 11 babies died because of incompetence and staff shortages. I only hope that I, and other Bermudians, will not die as a result of foolishness of government administrators. But as Stalin, the Russian Communist dictator, once said: “One death is a tragedy; 100 deaths is merely a statistic.”To Burt, Wilson and Commissiong, we are all statistics. It remains to be seen whether voters will support the nationalisation of our healthcare, and in the process convert our medical professionals into government bureaucrats who pay little attention to their Hippocratic oath — to do their best for their patients. A small historical point. In Stalin’s Russia, the Hippocratic oath was forbidden because it interfered with the physician’s loyalty to his employer — the Government. Loyalty to the Government outweighed any loyalty to the patient. This is the road on which we are travelling.As reported in The Royal Gazette, there is an online petition against the proposed healthcare changes making the rounds in Bermuda, which I have signed. I urge others to sign; otherwise, we run the real risk that our health system will be destroyed by the stupidity and ambitions of our power-grabbing politicians. Finally, this is the real question for Bermuda. Do you really want the trio of Burt, Wilson and Commissiong to have the power of life or death over you?Me, neither. The Bermuda public are being fooled — big time. • Robert Stewart is the author of two books on the Bermuda economy