Health minister Kim Wilson sold it as "technical and housekeeping". Instead, the Bermuda Health Council (Miscellaneous Amendments) Act 2026 passed in the House of Assembly on Friday enables an extensive subjective new oversight regime over pharmacies. A promised review of the Allshores/Phoenix deal still has not appeared.

The Bermuda Health Council tried to rush out this extensive new oversight regime this spring on a short consultation window. Concern about complexity and limited input was dismissed as "standard“.

When challenged on whether it was supported in the law, the council's lawyers accepted that pharmacies were not health service providers as the law stood and pointed to anticipated amendments. It is an ongoing pattern among health authorities: act first, defend the lack of legal basis, legislate later. The council raised its fees without parliamentary approval and only reversed course after being challenged.

In my own company's Supreme Court case, the court held there was no legal authority under the Pharmacy and Poisons Act for the annual inspection-and-certificate scheme then in use.

When the Health Service Provider regime was introduced in Parliament in 2024, the justification was for providers that did not have oversight; pharmacies already did. Now pharmacies are being brought under the council's licensing and standards regime, reconstituting oversight of the kind the court found had no basis under that Act.

Consider what that means at the counter. Under the Pharmacy and Poisons Act, my staff could ask an inspector for credentials before admitting them, the Supreme Court confirmed as much in 2023. Under section 14 of the Bermuda Health Council Act there is no such duty. Someone arrives, says they are a health council inspector, and asks to come in. There is no document they are obliged to produce. Refuse them and, if they were genuine, you have committed an offence carrying up to $20,000 on summary conviction and $30,000 on indictment. Admit them and you may have given an unverified stranger access to controlled drugs and patient records. The 2024 amendments also let the council engage private individuals as inspectors on the basis of "subject-matter expertise", so it need not be a public officer at the door.

What complaints exist for pharmacies to justify this change? The health council's reports do not provide any pharmacy breakdown. In the council's own consultation they claimed only three or four complaints about pharmacies per year. The last years with comparable system-wide totals in the annual reports are 2016-17, 2017-18 and 2018-19: 37, 57 and 89 complaints against an estimated 630 health providers, per the parliamentary debate on the amendments. The series was then dropped. The reply will be that complaints are under-reported and regulation is preventive. Preventive regulation still needs published evidence of the harm being prevented. None has been produced for this pharmacy regime.

Why should you care? More compliance costs hurt the smallest providers and favour the biggest, often the same parties who benefit from exclusivity deals. These costs flow to premiums and patients. The council chief executive has already written that "an oversupply of the wrong types of services and labour" can drive costs, and that there is "a strong case for public policy to target oversupply“. Independents carrying the same paperwork burden as chains raises a different question: whether a uniform compliance load that falls hardest on smaller providers sits easily alongside the council's own published case for targeting oversupply.

A Phoenix/Woodbourne pharmacist was sentenced for stealing controlled drugs and falsifying pharmaceutical records over several years. That is exactly the conduct regulation exists to catch.

On the reported facts, it was a colleague's check of the narcotics register that exposed it, not a surprise annual inspection. Enforcing the controlled-drug rules already on the books stood a chance of stopping it. Rebuilding a similar checklist under a new Act would not have.

The framework still treats tiny Bermuda retail pharmacies like UK hospitals: staff satisfaction surveys, succession planning, compassion-culture binders, while controlled-drug rules already in the Pharmacy and Poisons Act get repapered as checklist rows. That is not patient safety. That is hospital bureaucracy for a corner pharmacy, borrowed from the UK's CQC care-inspection model and applied to community pharmacies, which in the UK are regulated by the General Pharmaceutical Council, not the CQC.

The ready answer will be that the court never doubted the value of inspections, only the missing statutory hook, and that Parliament has now supplied it. Fair as far as annual inspection goes. Surveys, succession plans and culture binders are considerably broader than the gap the court identified.

Four months after the minister called for a 60-day deferral and a comprehensive review of that market-shifting Allshores/Phoenix deal, nothing has been published. No comparable oversight has been proposed for insurers or wholesalers, the parties whose decisions most directly shape what Bermudians pay and what they can get.

The council has held a statutory function to regulate the price at which drugs are sold to the public since 2004. It is not that no tool exists. They have one and when the dominant wholesaler priced above their own Phase I ceiling, the council moved those medicines into a paused Phase II rather than enforce. There is urgency for paperwork on pharmacies and silence on the deals that shape price and access.

This matters because of what the Supreme Court has already said about this regulator. In the Dr Soares/Hamilton Medical Centre case, the court described the council's conduct as "the height of unfairness", found it had "acted irrationally and unreasonably", and said this was "not a level playing field by any stretch of the imagination".

For a regulator already called out in those terms, expanding subjective powers over pharmacies while market deals go unpublished feels like a pattern, not a course correction.

You fund the health council to the tune of $5.36 a month, about $64 a year, from your premiums. The question is what that has bought. We keep being told that changes are needed to lower premiums and costs. If the minister's description was accurate, the council and minister should say plainly what changed for pharmacies and how it will lower costs and improve care, why a market-reshaping deal still gets no published review, and why there is no comparable urgency to place similar oversight on the parties involved.

• Denis Pitcher owns My Pharmacy LLC (My Pharmacy LLC v The Minister of Health et al [2023] SC (Bda) 88 Civ), which brought the Supreme Court challenge referred to above and will be regulated by this regime. He has no interest in any insurer, wholesaler, or party to the Allshores/Phoenix transaction