Mr. Jim Breslin:

On the face of it, it is a very strange decision to make if there is an option to be treated privately and people wait for two years in order to go with the NTPF and be treated privately when they could have exercised their insurance ahead to that. The director general is correct in that our requirement under law is to deliver public services to public patients and once people declare themselves a public patient we cannot take that away from them. There might be a case to be made for the information being made available to people in a fuller way but, fundamentally, that is the choice of the patient if he or she wants to be treated as a public patient.