Build PMC using private funds

ONCE again, “Bilums” (The National, Nov 23) got it all wrong, by illogical argument and not understanding what is actually said in the first place.
Of course investment in a health fund to finance the health care of the few people who have conditions that cannot be adequately dealt with by medical care that is already available in PNG is not a final solution.
But by using scarce health dollars for cost ineffective projects at this point when we have ordinary people dying from easily preventable and treatable diseases is not only bad health planning but counter-intuitive.
One does not have to be an expert in health planning to understand this.
The writer does not understand health budgeting and planning.
Ensuring health money is used effectively has nothing to do with “more concerned about our money than our lives”.
The whole point of good health planning is that one needs to spend health dollars wisely so that the most lives are benefited and saved.
Good health planning is not just to satisfy a few people or some special person with a rare condition or some doctors who want to use new technologies.
It is also very disappointing the writer used rude and demeaning literary trick of deliberately misinterpreting what someone said so that they could then knock down what they did not say – “insinuating that these ‘technologies’ are too complicated for our local doctors to use or that we do not possess the capacity to learn how to use them”.
Lastly, from previous letters by “Bilums”, I thought the writer was a health worker.
But I doubt that now because he/she does not even seem to understand “cost effectiveness”.
The whole point of my example of the Royal Hobart Hospital and heart surgery was to tell the people that Tasmania concluded it was safer and more cost effective to send their patients to Melbourne for heart surgery rather than keep on doing heart surgery in Royal Hobart Hospital because they were doing less than 200 cases per year, the minimum case load to keep the system going safely to do heart surgery. 
There is no “audacity” here, it is really just medical common sense.
In fact, all professionals know that practice makes perfect and trying to do complex things only once or twice a year is associated with sub-optimal performance and that is dangerous.
Anyone who knows me professionally will know that I have never tried to “stifle progress” in health.
In fact, I have spent most of my life trying to advance health by training the next generation of doctors and specialists. 
And my main agenda in this whole PMC debate is to try and get the best deal in health for the majority of citizens, of which, my family and I are members.
So I shall continue to advise the Health Department and government for this purpose.  
Let the PMC be built with private financing as the PM has directed.

Glen Mola
Port Moresby