Billy Kelleher (Cork North Central, Fianna Fail)
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I thank Ms Loughnane. Briefly, while everyone present probably is in agreement about how we should strive to achieve a universal health care model in the years ahead, the difficult parts will be the stepping stones to get there. It probably is fairly easy to reach broad consensus on the vision but the difficulty will be in trying to implement it in terms of policy, legislative underpinning and funding over the next number of years. In that context, Ms Loughnane referred to taxation being the main funding base for the public health system and then referred to how private health insurance only accounts for 10% of it. In that context, how does she envisage moving over time to a publicly-funded taxation-based model with universality at its core? Moreover, if one extrapolates on all the current intertwinings of the private health insurance and health care providers, even down to consultants' contracts and so on, how does she perceive its unwinding over time, essentially to push private health care completely out of the public system?