Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party)
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This might assist the policy makers because if, as Mr. Desmond states, we have the fifth highest spend in Europe, which is a very high level of spending per capita, given the wealth of other member states and if it is in the teeth of an environment where we have very low numbers of doctors, where one would have expected that we would have the fifth highest number of doctors. While Mr. Desmond cites that we are being challenged by demographics in terms of an increasing population, the reality is that in comparison with other European countries, we have a much younger population profile, which should see us having a much lower health spend, the bulk of health spending comes in the latter years and therefore countries which we are comparing ourselves against have a much higher percentage. Given our very low number of doctorsper capita, our very high spend and our very low youth age per capita, the figures would point one to question why we have a policy problem in how we are spending our money.