Patients group condemns health insurance increases

DRAMATIC increases in health insurance costs of up to six times the current rate of inflation have been condemned by a patients’ campaign group.

Irish Patients Association spokesperson, Stephen McMahon, said the price increases when taken against the current inflation rate of 4% and the present economic climate had to be seen as a major cause of concern.

He warned that with so many people losing their jobs and not getting cost of living increases, there was a risk that many would not renew their health cover and fall back on an already over-stretched public healthcare system.

“Our main concern is that the private health insurance market does not become destabilised,” he said.

“With private health insurance increasing between four and six times the rate of inflation at a time when there is pressure to reduce costs everywhere else, people will drop out of the private health system.”

Mr McMahon was particularly critical of the VHI for highlighting older age groups as being a cost to the system.

“Those people joined the VHI for lifetime cover and should not be highlighted in this manner as an expense to the company,” he stressed.

Consumer Association of Ireland chief executive, Dermot Jewell, said there was no doubt that the astonishing price hikes would put private health insurance out of reach of both current and potential customers.

He believed that the focus would now turn on the national health system because it would come under more pressure to provide a higher standard of service.

Irish citizens paid taxes for the public health service but it was not at the standard it should be to meet their needs, he said.

“The third player in our health structure is our public health service and it not getting the necessary attention as regards what it is doing with the money provided by taxpayers and why it cannot be improved rapidly,” he said.

Mr Jewell also feared that elderly people, regardless of the increased tax benefit, would not be able to continue paying for private health insurance, as they had done all their working life.

Fine Gael’s Health spokesperson, Dr James Reilly, believed many people would cancel their health insurance policies after learning of the massive price rises.

The increased prices were the result of Government mistakes and patients were being made to pay for them, he pointed out.

“Despite the Government’s stated aim to keep health insurance affordable for the elderly, their ill-judged measures are having the effect of making it unaffordable for many age groups, including the elderly,” he said.

“It is clear that the so-called community rating levy is being directly passed onto customers.

“How else can the VHI, with profits of €112 million last year, justify this increase,” he asked.

Labour’s health spokesperson, Jan O’Sullivan, said the development underlined the need to move to a universal health insurance system that her party had first proposed in 2002.