Real healthcare for all

FRANK Conway’s piece (Analysis, Dec 8) on whether to continue to buy private health insurance or not was informative and all the more depressing for that.

It clearly established the fact that buying private insurance is essentially a way of jumping the queue in the healthcare system.

We are never asked to consider the fact that such queue jumping for access to a public facility means that a person waiting with no private health insurance has to be shunted backwards in the queue to accommodate this fast tracking.

A single queue with no skipping would reduce the waiting times for public patients considerably, albeit increasing that of the private patients but not, however, anything like the waiting times that public patients have to endure at present.

Perhaps a better suggestion would be for all citizens to abandon buying private insurance and come together to insist on a public healthcare system that will treat all citizens, based only on their need, rather than the depth of their pockets.

Jim O’Sullivan

Rathedmond

Sligo