Mandatory health insurance in FG bid to scrap HSE

FINE GAEL has promised to abolish the HSE, renegotiate GP and consultants’ pay scales and require the majority of people to spend at least €200 a year on health insurance.

Its health manifesto, Fair Care, said by 2016 it would enter the final part of a three-stage process to break up the Health Service Executive and introduce a system of mandatory universal health insurance.

The party’s health spokesman Dr James Reilly said this would begin as soon as it entered government by adopting the Northern Ireland model of special delivery units to cut waiting lists.