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“[…] Ordinary citizens know the challenges all too well: waiting lines that stretch for hours before a doctor can be seen; appointments pushed months into the future; shortages of essential medicines, forcing families to search from pharmacy to pharmacy at unaffordable prices.
“Equipment is outdated or broken, leaving patients without proper tests or treatment; nurses and doctors who are dedicated but overworked, stretched beyond human limits; facilities that lack dignity, where patients are crowded into wards, privacy is ignored, and basic comfort is denied.
“[…] It is unfair. It is discriminatory. It is a betrayal of the principle that every human being deserves care, compassion and healing …”
The following Letter to the Editor on health care inequality in Trinidad and Tobago was submitted to Wired868 by Bryan St Louis of Bassa Hill, La Brea:
Health care should never be a privilege reserved for the wealthy. Life, health and healing are not commodities to be bought and sold. They are the essence of human dignity.
Yet in our society, access to proper medical care is too often determined not by need, but by wealth, insurance coverage, or whether you are deemed as someone who “counts”.
This is the lived reality. Those with resources, Medicare, or private insurance are ushered into the best hospitals, the best treatments, the best chances of survival. Those without are left to navigate overcrowded clinics, delayed diagnoses and the crushing weight of being told, implicitly or explicitly, that their lives matter less.
Ordinary citizens know the challenges all too well: waiting lines that stretch for hours before a doctor can be seen; appointments pushed months into the future; shortages of essential medicines, forcing families to search from pharmacy to pharmacy at unaffordable prices.
Equipment is outdated or broken, leaving patients without proper tests or treatment; nurses and doctors who are dedicated but overworked, stretched beyond human limits; facilities that lack dignity, where patients are crowded into wards, privacy is ignored, and basic comfort is denied.
Leaders know this, too. They see the statistics. They hear the cries. Yet too often, they turn a blind eye. They do not intervene to make the system equal for all. They speak of unity; they say we are in the same boat. But the truth is plain: some are in canoes, struggling against the waves, while others sail comfortably in yachts.
It is unfair. It is discriminatory. It is a betrayal of the principle that every human being deserves care, compassion and healing.
We must insist on a system where no one is classified as expendable. Where no one is denied treatment because of poverty. Where no one is forced to choose between medicine and food, or between survival and dignity.
Health care is not a privilege. It is a right.
And that right is not abstract. It is the right to walk into a clinic and be treated with dignity. The right to medicines that are available and affordable. The right to equipment that works and doctors who are supported. The right to equal care, whether you are rich or poor, insured or uninsured, powerful or ordinary.
I will not be silent, I will not relent, and I will not stop advocating. I will press for justice, demand dignity and believe in our shared humanity.
Health care today is not denied outright; it is rationed, selective and discriminatory, measured by status instead of need. To ration care is to deny justice, to violate a human right and to strip away dignity. Health care must never be treated as charity; it is justice in action, a human right to be defended and dignity that must never be denied.
And the truth is, we are already failing, because families are forced to choose between medicine and food, rent, light bills and the dignity of daily survival. Every such choice is proof of that failure.
We must not rest until health care is defended as fiercely as life itself, because survival must never depend on wealth.
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Bryan St Louis is a former education officer for the Communication Workers’ Union (CWU).
