I’m back from family holidays. George Farrugia Calleja is back from his flu:
Sorry about the absence over the holiday period, but lying face up in my cot trying to ward off the worst of the flu wasn’t conducive to penetrating analysis.
All’s well now, thank you for asking.
Thankfully, I didn’t need to go to hospital because of my indisposition because it might have got confusing, though not really, since Mater Dei hasn’t yet been sold off, as far as we know.
Now if I’d been struck down in Gozo, it might have been a different matter, because over the space of a few days, it seems that Vitals had come to an agreement with Steward Health, headed by Vitals’ former CEO (who actually seems to have been doing his thing with Steward while still with Vitals) to pass on the rather nifty deal they had made with Konrad Mizzi.
The Gozo Hospital, at least the part of it that is not being or not not being used by Barts to run a medical school, or not (confused? I sure am) was part of the sweet deal that Konrad Mizzi had made, along with goodly other chunks of our health service.
Anyway, no sooner had the ink dried on the regurgitated press-releases (the silence of the lambs in most of the newsrooms was deafening) that it started to become as clear as day (or mud) that the deal with Steward wasn’t quite as done and dusted as it looked like it was, even if Joseph Muscat’s spin-machine had already gone into overdrive to make us forget that what was being monetised was our health service.
You know, monetised in the same way our citizenship has been turned into a commodity (what’s Muscat going to do when this cash-cow goes dry? Incidentally, what price “the best of times” then?) and the same way the air that we breathe is going to start costing money.
And if you think I’m being far-fetched with the last line, work out in your mind what it’s going to cost you to breathe when strolling down the fume-infested canyons created by the horrendous high-rises Muscat’s good buddies are erecting all over the place.
But back to the Vitals deal/no deal farce, what was amusing as well was the sight of former PN MP Albert Fenech looking pretty bemused about the whole thing, telling us that he hadn’t been told anything, only to learn a few hours (seconds?) later that what was a deal maybe wasn’t quite a deal.
It’s enough to make even a heart surgeon get confused – which is another way of saying it ain’t rocket science: this is all a matter of Joseph Muscat’s mates’ rancid chickens coming home to roost.
The problem is that these flipping birds are crapping all over us and we have bugger all Opposition or media (with some exceptions) to give us some cover.