Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

That is okay. I ask Dr. de Buitléir to bear with me for a second. The first reason for doing it is that it will free up capacity in the public hospitals. The data would suggest that that is probably not true. The second reason for doing it is that it might free up financial resources, but if we do not know if private is subsidising or being subsidised by the public budgets, we do not know whether or not that is true. There is an ideological reason. None of us would stand over a situation where private patients jump the queue and get special treatment in public hospitals. The ideological or principled statement still holds very strongly but the mechanics, the rationale and the improvements in the system do not. Those arguments do not appear to hold, according to the report.

There is one other possibility, which concerns what this does to work within the hospitals. For example, if any group of people end up making much more money by seeing private patients, then some people might have accused some consultants of being encouraged to make sure there were lots of private patients to see and that perhaps, within a given hospital, the same consultant treating patients in a public hospital might spend much more time taking care of their private patients than their public patients. Other than the principle of removing private care, if it is not down to cost then it is not down to capacity, which does not seem to be the case, are there any other actual tangible advantages to doing it? We want to improve the system for public patients. Is anything Dr. de Buitléir can see on a day-to-day basis that, in real healthcare terms, would improve?