From M Ison.
IT is quite inconceivable that the Health department should even consider making diabetic patients pay for their treatment, for example on insulin, testing equipment and needles.

Diabetes is a life-threatening disease. The States have a duty of care to people to ensure that they have the appropriate medication to live their life. We are not a third world country.

To make diabetic people pay for their treatment and essential services to keep them alive is barbaric and tantamount to genocide.

While wealthy residents may be able to pay for treatment, ordinary folk cannot. People will avoid testing themselves, maybe miss an insulin shot, or use needles more than once. Maybe pensioners will not be able to buy enough food or pay for heating because they have to pay for their medication.

This will only lead to more unnecessary deaths and a strain on health resources when more patients will be admitted to hospitals because they have gone into a hypo. I cannot believe the Health department could think of doing this.

The government spends copious amounts of money on promoting Jersey to the finance sector. I wonder how that sector would feel if they knew that the local Health department was thinking, in my opinion, of basically contemplating murder of the diabetic race. Why have the diabetics been singled out? This is discrimination. Are there any lawyers out there who are diabetic who can take up an action for the diabetics?

Money should not be taken from essential services, no matter what department it is. The States should look towards their own costs first. Do we really need all those members in the government? The more people you have making decisions, the longer and harder it is to make decisions.

Now it has been proposed that States Members should have a pension. Well I think not. They are paid enough already. Hundreds of people in the Island do not earn anything like what the politicians get and those people have to fund their own pension or just receive the States pension. Politicians should fund their own pensions from their own salaries.

Budget costs for departments should be cut from unnecessary staffing levels, in particular paper-shuffling and empire-building managers. We need front-line workers, not copious amounts of managerial staff. Cutting a couple of managers could easily save the £170,000 that the Health department say is the diabetic costs. Privatise certain sections of the health service, or even make the whole Island pay for prescriptions again. If everyone had to pay only £2 for their prescriptions, surely that would be a more equitable option.

We must stand up for the diabetics of Jersey and any other people with a common affliction. No one type of disease should be singled out and discriminated against.

• Read more letters to the editor in today’s Jersey Evening Post