Let’s consider Bermuda’s position regarding health insurance. And while doing so, also consider the plight of young mother Ms Zy-Asia Forbes, aged 22. She now finds herself struggling without health insurance after an accident that has left with her with serious injuries and facing hundreds of thousands of projected medical costs. She is left to find alternative means to pay for her increasingly rising medical costs. In my opinion it is very disturbing that family members have now had to resort to establishing a GoFundMe page.

All the funds that are raised will not likely defer the total costs associated with the decade-long number of bills she will receive. These are prospective funds that will not be there to invest in her young daughter’s development. Will she have to emigrate to Britain as well to gain access to its health system to escape penury?

The reality is that if she were now living in another country that provides free healthcare, she would not have to face these problems.

For example, Canada's gross domestic product per capita is $54,795. Yet it provides free healthcare for all of its citizens.

Barbados’s GDP per capita is $25,366. Yet it also provides free healthcare for all its citizens.

Bermuda’s GDP per capita is $135,935. Yet it does not provide free healthcare for its people. Like this young mother.

In Bermuda right now, 7,300 Black Bermudians are without health insurance (source: BHC).

Virtually every professional working in Bermuda’s international business sector has free health insurance. Think about that.

Bermuda’s insurance premiums are rising right now. Thousands of Bermudians are uninsured and underinsured by political design — including our seniors.

Bermuda should position itself to provide free healthcare for all its people. Healthcare should be a right and not a privilege.

The reality is, as long as one’s access to healthcare is tied to one’s employment, private insurers and private clinics with all of the diagnostic bells and whistles, healthcare will remain a privilege and not a right. We will continue to see GoFundMe pages to raise money for Bermudians in similar circumstances.

The real issues are systemic; they revolve around social and economic imbalance and its intersection with race (disparities), as usual. Full stop.

Especially in a county that is the fourth richest in the world by GDP per capita.

Only three oil states in West Asia lead Bermuda in this statistical category.

Universal healthcare was supported by the Government — until it wasn’t — going back to 2018. Much like the living wage, it too has been placed in file 13 over the past eight years. Opponents will assert that in countries with universal healthcare it’s the long wait times that are a disqualifier for many. Of course, most of those who say this are the more affluent who have the benefit of being able to afford health insurance.

One of those naysayers said it resulted in the death of a waiting patient in another country that does provide free healthcare. However, with 7,300 Black Bermudians and roughly 2,000 Whites without health insurance in Bermuda, the uninsured in Bermuda are dying a slow, invisible death without the ability to pay for access to doctors and other health specialists.

No death is acceptable. I also know that the exception to the rule does not make the rule.

The Black under-50-year-old neoliberals who now form the political ruling class will claim that technology solves everything. Healthcare being but one claim; that blockchain, Bitcoin, AI are the future. Don’t believe them. Most of that technology is in private hands in the West, and like those who are opposed to universal healthcare, they are only interested in their own bottom lines. Their interest is not your interest. This seems contrary to the promises made and not kept in the 2017 platform.

Do not hitch your cart to that horse.

Outside of the private insurers, who have now merged (BF&M and Argus), the biggest opponents to universal healthcare are the doctors who run their private clinics. They are the second-largest drivers of the cost of healthcare, accounting for the thousands of Black Bermudians who are uninsured and underinsured.

I’ll say it one more time. This economy is increasingly unsustainable for growing numbers of Bermudians. The OBA cannot solve this because they too are captured by IB and the same interests I noted above. Oligarchy as in the US and Britain and beyond has produced nothing but the undermining of democracies throughout the West and unleashed massive amounts of income and wealth inequality.

Welcome to the fourth-richest country in the world.

• Rolfe Commissiong is a former Progressive Labour Party MP for Pembroke South East