Health spend ‘under 90% of EU average’

DESPITE the billions of euro being pumped into healthcare, Ireland is still spending less than 90% of the European average, a health expert warned yesterday.

Maev-Ann Wren said that while spending on health had increased hugely in the past five years, Ireland was still playing catch-up with other European countries.

“As recently as 1990 we were spending under 40% of the European average,” she pointed out. “You just have to look around to see the reality of that,” she said.

Apart from capital spending, Ireland’s expenditure on health was still under 90% of the European average.

Ms Wren is co-author of How Ireland Cares, a new book based on a report commissioned by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions.

The report argues a lack of investment over a prolonged period is responsible for the state of the country’s public hospitals.

It also argues that introducing a two-tiered healthcare system would take some private patients out of the public hospital system, but not all.

It claims private hospitals will cherry-pick the simplest, most profitable procedures and points out that private hospitals do not generally treat seriously ill medical patients, offer A&E facilities, intensive care or the interdisciplinary care that many patients need.

Both Ms Wren and the report’s co-author, US economist Dale Tussing, point out that the Government was reelected in 2002 based on the 2001 heath strategy.

The strategy envisaged a healthcare system with up to 600 primary care centres established over a 10-year period, 3,000 additional acute beds and more than 5,000 extra long-stay beds.

But, warned Ms Wren, the development of private hospitals alongside public hospitals would not free up public beds on a one-for-one basis.

“The reality is that over three-quarters of in-patients in public hospitals are medical patients, not surgical patients,” she said.

Private hospitals, by and large, concentrated on doing planned surgical procedures. Public hospitals, however, were full of ill people who needed multidisciplinary care and, whether or not they had private health insurance, private hospitals would not be treating them.

“We have no problem with standalone private hospitals that are selling into an equitable system but why do this now when there is a clear demand for State investment in the public system? This is expensive,” she said.

For every €22 million invested in private hospitals, it was costing the State €44m in tax relief. It was a very bizarre way to fund the healthcare system.

“It would be cheaper to grant aid hospital entrepreneurs than doing what we are doing,” she said.