Big business enters the Irish health ‘market’

DESPITE the opposition of its own planning inspector and well-founded opposition from local residents, medical consultants, councillors, opposition TDs and Foreign Affairs Minister Micheál Martin, Bord Pleanála has given the Beacon Medical Group (BMG) permission to build their colocated hospital in the grounds of Cork University Hospital.

No wonder people are cynical about the planning process. The interests of big business trump local interests and democracy again.

According to the John Hopkins Medicine International website, BMG is associated with the Texas-based Triad Hospitals Inc, the third largest private hospitals company in the world.

Apparently this company was set to manage the first BMG hospital built in Sandymount, Dublin, in 2006.

However, the Beacon Hospital Dublin is partnered with UPMC which is described on the Beacon Hospital website as “an integrated global health enterprise headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and one of the leading non-profit health systems in the United States”.

It’s an enterprise which is “commercialising its medical and technological expertise by nurturing new companies, developing strategic business relationships with some of the world’s leading multinational corporations and expanding into international markets, including Italy, Ireland, the United Kingdom and Qatar”.

It is interesting to note that UPMC regards the public healthcare system in Ireland as a “market”.

Despite the worldwide economic catastrophe caused by globalised free market capitalism, Health Minister Mary Harney’s drive for private hospital colocation seems to indicate the Government is still wedded to that destructive system, a key feature of which is the demand to create a market in public services – including the health service.

In short, to privatise them, which is often what is actually meant when we are told there is a need for “reform” of the health service.

Despite the best intentions of those who run the Beacon Health Group and UPMC, colocation may develop into the thin end of a globalised free-market capitalist privatisation wedge.

Those who believe in a publicly owned and controlled health service must surely resist colocation of private hospitals on public hospital sites with all the means at their disposal.

Brian Abbott

Glencairn

Bishopstown Road

Cork