A&E trolleys are Haughey’s legacy

AT the heart of the health service crisis is the urgent need to put back 3,000 public hospital beds.

The Government’s solution is not to invest public money in putting those beds in public hospitals, nor to invest in the staff to care for the patients in them, but instead to provide private beds in for-profit hospitals run by multinationals. The American multinational Triad, for example, will run the new Beacon Clinic in Sandyford in Dublin.

For-profit hospitals will be given State handouts of billions in tax breaks and public land and will not give full services — they will just cherry-pick straightforward elective surgical cases, giving us the unequal and ineffective US health model.