Exposed: the litany of wasted cash in our health service

VHI and BUPA were let off on a 1 million bill to a public hospital because the doctors wouldn’t give details of the treatment provided to a private patient.

A health board employee was overpaid around 30,000 over a 10-month period and another health board paid over almost 450,000 for a site it was buying, even though the ownership of the land was not sorted out.

Going through a litany of poor financial management in the health service, Professor Niamh Brennan yesterday cited the failure of public hospitals to properly impose or collect bills for treating public patients as a classic example discovered during the preparation of the Brennan Report.