Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Universal health insurance is another con. It is another regressive tax to be imposed on people who are already struggling and already burdened with a massive tax burden, whether it is the universal social charge, all sorts of indirect stealth taxes and charges, bin charges, the planned water charges, VAT on everything people buy or parking charges. On top of all that, the Minister is going to land them with another flat regressive tax to pay for something they have already paid for through their taxes.

The Minister will be asking them to pay all of this money for a health service that is crumbling. It is extraordinary. This is a health service that has been butchered by the Government and by the Fianna Fáil Government before it, where we have €3 billion taken out of the health service and 10,000 staff gone, including thousands of nurses, where consultants in Dublin's leading hospitals say the hospitals are unsafe, where there is an ongoing crisis in accident and emergency and where we have enormous waiting lists for operations and huge numbers - hundreds of thousands - waiting for consultant appointments. To add insult to this injury and this shambles of a health service, the Minister is proposing to pile on top of that a new health tax. It is scandalous.

It is like so much we get from this Government.

It is the pie-in-the-sky, so-called reform which in reality is just another austerity attack on ordinary people, particularly low and middle-income people, to the benefit of the usual gang of corporate, for-profit cronies. That is what this is really about. It is about using the atmosphere of economic crisis to privatise the health service and hand it over lock, stock and barrel to the private health insurance companies and the vultures who are moving in on private health care. This is possibly best symbolised by the recent takeover of the Beacon Hospital by one of the country's richest men, Denis O'Brien. One knows that something is going on when these people start moving into health because it is an opportunity to make yet another buck on the back of the misery suffered by ordinary citizens.

When one talks about universal health insurance, the first two words sound lovely and, of course, everybody is in favour of them. Universal health and a single-tier system are what everybody wants but when one adds on the critical word "insurance", one gives the game away because what one is really talking about is the private, for-profit sector moving in on health to make a profit. We know from the US and the Netherlands, home to the so-called Dutch model, that when one moves towards universal health insurance, vast amounts of money are sucked out of the pockets of people and front-line services into the pockets of overpaid executives and overpaid consultants and go towards the costs of billing, advertising and all the paraphernalia that goes with private, for-profit, market competition. The US spends almost twice as much per capitaon health than any other country in the world but about 40% of what is spent goes on administration, executive salaries, advertising and billing. That is where it will go.

The question the Minister must answer is how much profit these companies will make. Why should they be making profits at all? How can the Minister possibly justify anybody profiting out of our health service when we all know that front-line services are crumbling? Could he explain how this is logical, justified and fair when everybody knows that what we need are nurses, ambulances, new equipment, primary care centres and drugs that are affordable for people. We need the actual service that keeps people alive and healthy. That is where we need to put the money into but as with Irish Water and waste services that were privatised, the Minister wants to put the money into the pockets of private companies who will make a very significant margin.

Once that profit motive is introduced, the idea that the system is single tier will disappear into the mist. While there may be a basic basket of services that the Minister will force people to pay handsomely for against a background where the money going into front-line services is totally inadequate, those people with money will pay for premium insurance cover and get extra services because they can afford to pay for them. That is what happens anywhere the private, for-profit sector operates. The alternative to this is a national health service model where everybody has the right to health care from the cradle to the grave, there is no private, for-profit interest involved, and the entire system is paid for through central taxation. One then does not need vast administration and vast amounts of advertising. Money is not sucked out for profits and executive salaries. The money is paid for through the taxation system administered by Revenue. Is that not more logical, more efficient and fairer?

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