Mr. Jim Breslin:

Let me try to give the Deputy further insight. There was the principle of the matter, which was that if we were facing the kind of overwhelming surge that was going to take place it should be public and single tier. There was also the practicality of the matter. None of us knew exactly what that would look like during the month of April. What was put in place was a cost-only reimbursement model, where the costs of the hospitals were reimbursed. The difficulty in that situation where one had cost recovery for all of the costs within a hospital lay in disagreggating how much of that was being incurred by private health insurers and private patients. This would have left us all with a situation where legitimate questions could be asked about whether the public money going in was benefiting public patients or cross-subsidising private patients who were continuing to have preferential access into what were now fully publicly-funded facilities.