Two-tier health system is the aim

THE Government is not bidding to smash the two-tier health system, as you claim in your editorial (Irish Examiner, April 12).

It wants totally to segregate the public and the private system and thereby further institutionalise the two-tier structure.

Developers have been given significant tax incentives by Government to develop private hospital facilities. This has led to the opening of a number of new hospitals in Dublin, Galway and Waterford.

More private hospitals are in the pipeline as a direct consequence of this policy.

The development of co-located hospitals, whereby developers are being given access to hospital lands to develop private hospitals, in addition to the tax concessions, is an extension of this drive by Government to develop the private healthcare sector.

In answer to a Dáil question last November, the Minister for Health and Children, Mary Harney, confirmed that a net additional 235 acute public in-patient hospital beds had been provided since the health strategy was accepted by Government in 2001. This is the same strategy that promised an additional 2,840 such beds by 2011.

This country has been very successful at recruiting the highest quality hospital consultants with direct benefit for citizens. The current proposals from the Government are designed to end that. Both Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and a predecessor, Dr Garret FitzGerald, have highlighted the fact that the combination of public and private medicine on the one site meant that regardless of their resources, public patients could get access to the same highly-qualified consultants as private patients.

Why is the Government segregating the two systems again? There may be many explanations, but the one that makes most sense to me is that it wants to force the public into buying private healthcare so that it can reduce its expenditure on the public side.

If I am correct in my analysis, that will be a very backward step for our health services and it will fly in the face of the health strategy endorsed by voters at the last general election.

Donal Duffy

Asst Secretary General

Irish Hospital

Consultants’ Association

Heritage House

Dundrum Office Park

Dundrum

Dublin 14