Dr. Conor Keegan:

Within the public system now, for all discharges whether they are public or private, the hospital in-patient enquiry, HIPE, scheme collects information on expenditure and the cost to the hospital. There is activity-based funding now whereby there is a unit cost of care and for each discharge, there will be a complexity-associated score for that discharge. One will also have information as to whether that discharge is public or private. That captures the cost to the hospital. For public patients, it will capture things like salary and consultant costs, nursing costs, non-pay costs and so forth. For the private discharges, it will just capture the cost to the hospital and there would be no consultant costs included, which are paid separately by the insurer.

One could get an idea there of the expenditure but returning to Deputy Donnelly's point, the question is whether the income coming from the insurers actually covers that. That is an issue that unfortunately we currently cannot get at.