New Government, New Policy Needed to Solve Health Crisis
Posted on January 20, 2011 at 08:39 PM
Statement by Joe Costello TD
Speaking on Private Members' Motion
Wednesday, 19 January 2011
There is an obvious solution to the decade-long crisis in our health services: A new policy, a new Government and a new Minister for Health are needed urgently. It is incredible that any government would close hospitals and shut down wards when the country’s population is growing rapidly.
It is incredible that any government would erect a new tier of administration, namely, the HSE and place it directly on top of the old tier instead of replacing the existing tier first.
It is incredible that after declaring a national emergency in A&Es in 2006 and delivering a 10 point plan for the elimination of the A&E chaos within six months a record number of 569 patients were waiting on trolleys in A&Es in the first week of January 2011!
Any Minister who presided over such a dysfunctional system would have been expected to resign. Instead the Minister for Health was blissfully holidaying in the Far East, far away from it all.
That sums up the Irish health system- a third world health system in a first world country.
Now the Minister has sanctioned a massive 45% increase for Plan B the most popular of all the VHI plans. Such an increase is unprecedented. It is directly caused by the Minister’s failure to introduce legislation to provide for risk equalisation which was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2008.
The Government has failed to introduce new enabling legislation and, of course, now that its days are numbered it certainly cannot do so.
In the meantime the savage increases are introduced by a VHI which has a disproportionate number of elderly people. The Minister tells the public that people should shop around. That is not much solace to the VHI’s 1.35 million customers who have paid their annual premium loyally to the VHI for years and years.
In the present recession very many people will be faced with the hard choice of dropping their healthcare altogether, reducing it or spending more money then they can afford on health care that now costs nearly double.
Indeed the Minister’s decision to approve such a whopping increase has nothing to do with the care of the patients. Her amendment to the Private Members Motion clearly demonstrates that her policy is deliberately to force elderly patients to transfer out of VHI so that the company is prepared for sale. "Arranging the sale of the VHI with appropriate capitalisation and authorisation" she says is her objective.
It appears that the VHI is the final victim of Minister Harney and her defunct PD Party.
The Labour Party will dismantle the inequitable and uncaring edifice that PD policy has erected in the health sector.
Our Universal Health Insurance Policy which will be launched shortly will provide equality of health care to each member of the community on the basis of medical need.
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