No mercy shown to lone parents or ‘older and sicker’ VHI members

WHERE, one would have to wonder, did this flurry of ideological activity, with no mandate, come from?

Last Friday one of the strangest, and meanest, pieces of legislation I’ve ever seen was published. And the previous day, completely out of the blue, the privatisation of the VHI was announced.

Let’s have a look at the VHI first, and I suppose I’d better declare an interest. For the whole of my adult life I’ve been a VHI subscriber. I’ve always regarded it as a good investment for my family and as a way of contributing to the development of the health service.

In my innocence, I’ve always assumed the combination of state-run health service and state-run insurance represented a sort of national safety net.

If you’re sick, you can turn to the health service. They’ll make you better. And the VHI will help in that process. Together, the health service and the insurance will function as a sort of one-stop shop – you place yourself in their hands and a team will click into place to sort you out.

Over the years I’ve had plenty of reason to be grateful to the VHI. In terms of customer service, it has always been a good and efficient company – you get what you pay for, without undue question. Mind you, the mind sometimes boggles at the amounts that appear on statements as having been paid out, but it is a comfort to know the VHI has always stood behind me and my family when we needed them.

And my family isn’t alone in this. Thousands and thousands of Irish families have stayed loyal to the VHI over the years and felt that loyalty was reciprocated in a degree of protection. We are all stakeholders in the VHI. But that, apparently, doesn’t entitle us to be consulted in any way if the Government decides to sell the VHI to the highest bidder. Then we just have to like it or lump it.

That’s bad enough, but it’s really galling to be told the VHI is going to be sold off in the interests of its subscribers – to protect us – to prevent what the Minister for Health and Children kept referring to as “older and sicker” people having to face higher premia.

A state company currently making a loss is going to be sold to the private sector and the purchaser, who will have to put up a lot of money to buy it, is going to keep premia at their present level while they try to recoup their investment and cut the losses in their new purchase?

There’s more fantasy than reality in that proposition. Once the VHI has been sold, and irrespective of any promises about risk equalisation and community rating, we will all be subject to considerably higher health insurance costs than now. But it will also be a step towards the American system where the profitability of the health insurance companies has always had a higher priority than any notion of access to decent care. That will ultimately have enormous consequences for people, especially people on low and middle incomes.

I never voted for that, either as a subscriber or as a citizen, and I don’t know where the mandate for it comes from.

But they’ve started to dismantle another safety net, too, and I don’t believe any of us ever voted for that either.

Our social welfare system exists to protect people, not to punish them. And when a government starts to use the social welfare system as a stick to beat people with, I think we’re all entitled to ask whose views they’re representing now.

You can search the election manifestos of all the parties and individuals in the Government from top to bottom and you won’t find any reference to the measures announced last week in any of them.

But still, the Social Welfare (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2010, in its 25 sections, sets out to punish unemployed people who don’t want to do what a FÁS officer tells them to do.

Under this legislation, if you don’t want to take a job or a training course that someone else decides is appropriate for you, you get a massive reduction in your unemployment assistance. It smacks of whipping people into line.

We seem to be trying to create an environment where there are deserving unemployed people who will get one rate of payment and undeserving unemployed people who will get a lot less.

There was a time in Ireland where the deserving poor got charity and the undeserving poor got the workhouse. Is that what we want to recreate?

And there was a time in Ireland when we routinely stigmatised lone parenthood. Having a baby without being married was a source of shame – and the reason we had so many of those cursed Magdalene laundries.

The new social welfare bill will be promulgated by all sorts of sly (and not so sly) whisperings about girls who deliberately set out to get pregnant to get housing points and an easy income off the state. We’re going to start stigmatising lone parenthood all over again, and it’s hard to think of anything more disgusting in this day and age.

Don’t get me wrong. Lone parenthood is a poverty trap. But the reason it’s a poverty trap is because we’ve never put the choices in places to really enable lone parents, especially young ones, to stay in education or to go back to it. The supports aren’t there, the childcare isn’t there, the employer attitudes aren’t there.

So instead of setting out to build the supports, we set out to introduce punishment. And you know the funny thing?

IN its press release announcing the punishment, the Department of Social Protection (that’s what it’s called now, laughably), said “these changes will bring Ireland’s support for lone parents more in line with international provisions, where there is a general movement away from long-term and passive income support. The EU countries that are achieving the best outcomes in terms of tackling child poverty are those that are combining strategies aimed at facilitating access to employment and enabling services (eg, childcare) with income support”.

Yes. But those countries put the supports and incentives in place. We’re not doing that – in fact over the past few years we’ve reduced the supports for “enabling services”. That’s one of the reasons child poverty is rising in Ireland. And the only thing the 25 sections of the Social Welfare (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2010 will do is increase the rate and incidence of child poverty further.

And there is no mandate for any of it. We all know the only reason the Government is doing this is to save another few bob. Unemployed people and lone parents (who have already seen major cuts in their support, don’t forget) are now to be added to the list of those who will be punished because of the catastrophic failure of our Government’s economic and fiscal policies. And the “older and sicker” people to whom so much lip service was paid in various speeches last week will have to pay for that failure too.

Isn’t that something to be proud of?