Rising health costs hard medicine to swallow
ANYBODY remember the National Health Strategy?
Health Minister Micheál Martin’s jargon-filled 13 billion prescription to cure the ills of the health service was launched with great aplomb at the end of last year. It was people-centred, multi-disciplinary and would be monitored and evaluated in a designated, cohesive, integrated, focused, coordinated framework and approached with capacity, efficiency and equity.
Anybody remember the Programme for Government? It emerged during the general election, before the World Cup, the Roy and Mick spat, the miserable summer and the FAI’s pie in the Sky deal, and it pledged to target inequalities in the health service.
Yet, just months later, it costs more to get private health insurance, you get less of a subsidy from the Government for your prescription costs and it costs more to go to an Accident and Emergency ward. Monitor and evaluate that for the equity.
And already since the start of the year, it costs more to go to the doctor because GP fees are one of the services identified as having displayed “unusual price increases” during the euro changeover. In other words, family doctors took advantage of the euro changeover to jack up costs per visit, and got caught by a price survey by Forfás.
The VHI premium increase may have captured the most attention as it added up to 400 onto the cost of a family’s health insurance, but it wasn’t the only move that will add to your health care costs.
Last Friday night, when the Taoiseach went to war with the FAI telling them to tear up their lucrative deal with Sky, an announcement that will affect many families quietly drifted out from the Department of Health.
The threshold for the drugs payment scheme was increased by 22%. Minister Martin’s reduction in the State subsidies for drugs means patients with already big medicine bills will have to pay 63 of their monthly cost, a rise of 10. And while we’re dealing with tenners, the charge for attending the Accident and Emergency unit, without a doctor’s note, went up from 30 to 40.
As an aside to the increase in the VHI cost the other night, the minister threw out two other signs that the old coffers aren’t as flush as they should be. Patients will be charged an extra 3 for an overnight or day stay in a private bed in a public hospital, pushing the cost to 36.
And while we’re dealing with round figures, 800 of the 6,000 additional jobs sanctioned for the health service have been scrapped. But most of these were management and administrative positions and their non-appointment will have a minimal impact on patient services, the minister said.
That’s all right then. What difference would a few hundred managers and clericals make anyway? Makes you wonder though, if they weren’t that vital, why were they being appointed in the first place?
Now we get to the interesting part. Basically, despite the pronouncements that health is the top priority for this government, the Department of Health is as prone as any other department to a spot of belt tightening.
In the never-ending quest to balance the books and achieve a small but morally significant budget surplus, Finance Minister Charlie McCreevy has told his cabinet colleagues to slash and burn their budgets.
Apparently, only the health department is exempt from the cost-cutting drive. Strange then that in the space of a week, four separate cost-cutting and revenue-increasing exercises have been announced. Maybe the budget isn’t being cut but it has to be stretched to the limit for the rest of the year as there isn’t going to be any further hand-outs.
Don’t be fooled by the jargon. To put it plainly: There’s a lot of cuts done, more to come.
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