Alan Kelly (Tipperary, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Deputy Kelleher has covered three quarters of the question I had on universal health care. As a final component of that question, we as a committee are faced with a job to make a recommendation, obviously going down the road of universal health care. My question is, when do we jump and what do we jump to? If we are going to jump, do we pick a date in the future and say we are going to have a universal health care system, but what will it be? Do we take the big bang approach and say now is the time we are going to do this, or do we opt for a date into the future, and how do we itemise what would be in it? In totality, when we put forward a proposal, as is the job of this committee, in a defined period of time, are we better off to set it in a staged process, or to identify what it is and say that we want this now, we have the budget for it, and this is the timeframe for doing so, or is it a mixture of both?