Irish Examiner View: How is this queue dodge different?

The Beacon Hospital Covid-19 vaccination controversy is just another event in a long list of queue-jumping in our health services.

Coronavirus vaccine operations at the Beacon Hospital are to be suspended after it used spare doses to vaccinate teachers at a private school. 

If that well-travelled and supposedly impartial observer, the Man from Mars, arrived today he could not but notice the outrage over the decision by the private, for-profit hospital, The Beacon in Dublin to give unused vaccines to teachers in a private school — coincidentally, the school where The Beacon's CEO pays to have his children educated.

However, if the Man from Mars applied his famously disinterested logic he might well ask what the fuss is really about. Is it about inter-class begrudgery? Or is it, just maybe, provoked by a collective and outraged social conscience? Unlikely, or at least our history suggests not. Or maybe it's just a consequence of entirely-justified and unsettling Covid-19 anxiety. That question would be informed by the realisation that our entire health system is predicated on the kind of paid-for privilege that saw teachers from St Gerard’s private school near Bray, and the staff and managers at Park Academy, which runs private creches used by Beacon staff, vaccinated long before official schedules suggested they might be. This institutionalised queue-jumping is the very epitome of our grossly unfair health system so what's the problem? Why are we all of a sudden outraged? 

Why is there not a comparable tsunami of rage over the fact that over recent years thousands of people have had to travel from the South West on the Belfast-or-Blind bus to try to save their sight? They are forced to do this because our cataract services are so inadequate that they face up to four years on a waiting list for an operation that takes just minutes but changes lives dramatically. Those with cataract issues in a position to pay via one insurance company or another — the VHI Positive cohort — face no such delays and can expect an early appointment at one of the 18 private hospitals that operate under the umbrella of the Private Hospitals' Association.

When, just last month, the Dáil heard that over 8,500 young people are waiting for primary care psychological services and around 2,500 children or adolescents are on waiting lists for mental health services there was no tsunami of rage either. Sinn Fein’s Deputy Mark Ward pointed out that since 2017, 242 children have been admitted to adult psychiatric services, making the never-again promises made after one historic abuse scandal or another ring pretty hollow.

Earlier this month the Irish Hospital Consultants' Association warned that almost a million people could be on waiting lists by the end of this year unless a shortage of beds and staff is addressed. The IHCA warned that public hospitals may suspend more than 900,000 patient appointments by the end of this year.

There myriad examples of this pay-up-or-suffer-on — or die as was the case with Susie Long in 2007  —health provision. In the 10 years since Fine Gael proposed but quickly abandoned the idea of universal health insurance, the need for a levelling out, as shown by the Beacon vaccinations, has grown.

How the 2.31m citizens, 46% of the population, paying for inpatient health insurance at the end of 2020 might regard that prospect is not hard to imagine. Self-interest would trump social justice, reflecting deeply embedded hypocrisy even if concerns on service delays are justified and drive this expensive commitment. The Beacon scandal, and those like it as yet uncovered, has provoked outrage but in the overall context of our divided, unfair health system it, as the Man from Mars would point out, is only the tip of a very toxic iceberg.