Letter to the Editor: HSE doomed to failure as services are outsourced
I am still surprised, when I read an article such as Alison O’Connor’s ‘Fixing the HSE is a major operation and Reid will need billions to do it’ (Irish Examiner, November 1,) to find that it is possible that those who hang about the corridors of power in search of the inside track still haven’t got it yet when it comes to understanding what ails the health service — and indeed most other services that are best delivered by government.
The fact is that the ideology that took over all things in Leinster House this past few decades has no wish to “sort” the problems so as to deliver a decent public health service. The focus is and has been, to slowly hand over the service to private, for-profit entities.
Every new ‘service’ added is outsourced and, where possible, so are existing ones. We see across the board as specific services come under strain, private entities are called upon as a stop-gap rather than investing scarce resources in finding permanent in-house solutions.
It is the corrosive encroachment of profit-seeking that is undermining efforts to deliver health services, not lack of funding.
Suggesting that throwing money at it will solve anything is facile and would only increase the amount of money flowing into the pockets of privateers.
In the USA, the total spend on healthcare per capita is twice ours yet access to care is impossible for more than 50m of its citizens — a place to which we are heading rapidly as we contrive to hand on to our children, not only a broken healthcare system, but a broken society too.
This reader's opinion was originally published in the print edition of the Irish Examiner on November 4, 2019
