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

I oppose the whole section. I am against a two-tier health system. I do not think people should have to take out private health insurance so I am not particularly in favour of the principle of giving tax breaks to copper-fasten a two-tier system. Most people who take out private health insurance do so out of fear and anxiety that if they get sick they will not get the sort of care that they need in the public system.

I think most people would prefer to have a public system on which they could rely and in which they felt safe, and which would look after them and their health from the cradle to the grave. If that option was given to people, they would jump at it. However, because that is not what we have, people are forced to take out private health insurance which is not, for the most part, gold-plated with gold-plated premiums. These are ordinary working people trying to create a health safety net for themselves against the likelihood that at some stage they will be sick or they are people who know they are sick and will have a need for health services and do not believe the public system is up to scratch. If this measure was in a different context, such as in a context of at least maintaining or, better still, increasing the level of resourcing, funding and staffing in the public health service, then I could understand the proposal as I would if it was a proposal to phase out the two-tier system in order to bring in a top quality public health system available to everyone at the point of need, which is what we should have, but that is not what it is. This is an attack on people who make great sacrifices to take out health insurance because they do not feel confident that the public system can cope with their needs or give them the service they need when they will most need it. The public system is being butchered and its budgets and staffing levels are being slashed.

The Minister's budget proposes to take away significant funding. The anecdotal evidence is that people are deciding not to take out health insurance because they can no longer afford it. They will get sicker because they do not believe they can afford to pay the cash to the hospital or to the GP and they will fall back on the public system which is being slashed to pieces and is unable to cope as it stands. That will be the consequence. There is no way of presenting this proposal as anything other than another cruel, unfair cut which hits people where they are vulnerable. Therefore, I utterly oppose it and I suggest the Minister should withdraw it. He should withdraw it, not just as a single measure, but in the context of understanding that what people want is a public health service that is available to everybody and in which they have confidence. That is what the Minister promised. He did not quite put it in those terms during the election campaign. In the mind of the public, universal health insurance sounds very like a universal health service for everybody when they need it. That is what I suspect most people thought the Minister was talking about but that is not what they are getting. However, that is what people want and that is what the Minister should give them. This is just another attack and I oppose it completely.