Once again, doctors are sounding the alarm, and once again, the Government is offering excuses. And this time, the patients who depend on National Health Insurance are caught in the middle of a crisis this administration refuses to honestly confront.
This week, the newly formed National Health Insurance Providers Association appeared publicly to raise concerns that are by now painfully familiar: payments are two months overdue, the most recent disbursement covered only half of what was owed, and providers have received no rate increase since 2017, even as the cost of living has risen by more than 30 percent.
This is not a new problem. This is a pattern that has persisted for nearly two years, and it has one root cause: the Government did not budget enough money for NHI.
The Government’s own National Health Strategy report, released just months ago, warned that the health system’s financing is on an “unsustainable track” with a projected deficit of $24 million by fiscal year 2026. And yet this administration responded by increasing NHI’s budget by a mere $2 million, to $48.2 million, a figure that was already being outpaced by demand before the fiscal year even began.
What we are witnessing is fiscal gymnastics with real human consequences. The Government has been boasting of a budget surplus while allowing the doctors who serve NHI patients to go months without payment, forcing them to personally finance a scheme the Government is legally and morally responsible for funding.
When the Prime Minister responded to this crisis by suggesting “irregularities” in provider billing, without evidence and without specificity, he threw the reputation of Bahamian doctors under the bus to deflect from his own government’s failure. It was unworthy of the office, and it was factually indefensible. Physicians in the NHI capitation model do not even submit individual billing claims. The anomalies, if any exist, are within a system the Government itself built and manages.
The Free National Movement is unequivocal: an FNM government would recognize and engage with a properly constituted physicians’ association representing NHI providers as a legitimate negotiating body. We believe that doctors who participate in NHI deserve a clear, organized voice through which fair and equitable agreements can be reached, not an arrangement in which government policy is made without them and announced to them after the fact. Good health policy is not built in isolation. It is built in partnership with the professionals who deliver care every day.
Let me be direct about what this government’s record reveals. For four years, the Davis Administration has expanded NHI’s enrolment and broadened its benefits without adequately funding the program to sustain those expansions. It has made promises about universal health coverage while allowing the financial architecture underneath NHI to weaken. It has produced a National Health Strategy Report that candidly acknowledges a $24 million funding gap and then done nothing meaningful to close it. And when doctors finally speak out publicly, the Prime Minister’s instinct is to question their integrity rather than accept responsibility.
This Government can call it a reconciliation exercise. It can call it a cash flow challenge. It can blame irregularities that it cannot name and cannot prove.
But the Bahamian people know what it actually is: a government that overpromised, underfunded, and is now asking doctors, and ultimately patients, to bear the cost of its own fiscal mismanagement.
The FNM calls on the Government to immediately release all outstanding payments to NHI providers, to formally engage with the National Health Insurance Providers Association, and to present to Parliament and the Bahamian people a credible, fully funded plan for the long-term sustainability of NHI. Anything less is a continuation of the same pattern that has brought us to this point.