Health insurance issue should be sorted out before the general election

I REMARKED to my family months ago that if I was a BUPA director I would advise my shareholders the company should pull out of Ireland because I would be negligent if I allowed it knowingly to incur a liability three times greater than likely profits.

So it seems to me that any politicians who say they are surprised at BUPA’s decision to do just that are either commercially naive or they are not telling the truth.

Earlier this year, VHI said they would incur losses of €30million before risk equalisation and that, without it, they would be out of business.

With BUPA soon out of the way, they are not going to get most of their ‘compensation’.

Even if all BUPA customers were to move to a transformed VHI — equally efficient and similarly profitable — it might be expected to make the €65m additional profit expected of BUPA.

This would still leave VHI nearly €100m short of the ‘compensation’ it expected.

So if VHI were run on normal commercial lines, its directors would be telling its shareholders now that it, too, should pull out of Ireland.

Clearly, modern competition law would prevent them from abusing their near monopoly position to extort price increases from the public as there are serious penalties for directors involved in price-fixing.

So would this leave us in a Vivas monopoly situation? What is certain is we would be back to the 1980s, and before, with a single supplier able to charge what it wanted and to hell with efficiency.

I think we need this sorted before the next election.

Setting the health provision of the country back 20 years is not a trivial issue that politicians can wash their hands of and tell us how surprised they are.

We are not naive and do not like being told lies.

Andrew Doyle

Clifden

Lehenagh

Lislevane

Co Cork