It never rains but it pours. State run hospitals are reportedly facing a double whammy. Besides being in the throes of a severe scarcity of vital drugs, a shortage of saline is said to be staring them in the face. It is feared, as we reported yesterday, that unless the fast dwindling stocks of saline etc are replenished posthaste, the health sector will be plunged into a crisis. The situation has assumed so alarming a proportion that a high ranking government official happened to suggest at a recent meeting attended by health officials and new Minister of Health Maithripala Sirisena that gods be invoked to tackle the problem.

It looks as if not even those 330 million heavenly beings or thistuhn kotiyak devi devatavun vahansela believed to protect this country were equal to the task of hoisting the health sector from the mire it finds itself in. It is rotten to the core, to say the least. The situation is more or less the same elsewhere. State institutions have been neglected and/or mismanaged under successive governments.

What really ails the health sector is the culture of impunity. No one is held responsible for anything. There have been many instances of drug shortages in government hospitals. Politicians and bureaucrats always get away with their lapses that result in such unfortunate yet unavoidable situations.

Health workers and their trade unions are busy making various demands and fighting among themselves for supremacy. Once in a way they make a hue and cry about a phial or two of some contaminated drug, gain media exposure and drop the issue. Or, they launch a half-hearted attack on the Health Minister to make some political mileage and stop at that.

The incumbent Health Minister seems to be making an effort to clean the mess in the health sector. But, one should not make the mistake of pinning one's hopes on him, if his performance as the Minister of Agriculture in the previous government is anything to go by. New brooms cease to sweep well with the passage of time! Whether Minister Sirisena, too, will give in to powerful trade unions, which run the Health Ministry in all but name, end up as putty in the hands of the pharmaceutical Mafia remains to be seen.

Free health care is no charity. It is a right of the public. People pay for it through direct and indirect taxes, with which the whole caboodle of bureaucrats and their political bosses are maintained. Those who fail to ensure the smooth functioning of government hospitals do not deserve their salaries and perks. They must be sacked!

If Minister Sirisena does not want to land himself in the same soup as his predecessor, he has to overhaul the Health Ministry bureaucracy. Having a new minister with inefficient and bungling bureaucrats in key slots is like installing a new water tank without replacing a rusty, leaky pipeline. His plans for improving the health sector, if any, will never get carried out and he will be toiling in vain. His success hinges on his ability to purge his ministry and departments of inefficiency and corruption.