Liam Twomey (Wexford, Fine Gael)

Essentially, nothing will change until publication of another report at the end of March.

It is important that we ask those who pay private health insurance premia. What will their situation be when the Minister receives the report at the end of March and they face the next general election? VHI, without risk equalisation payments, will increase its premia by between 5% and 10%. The Minister's co-location plan to build private hospitals and move private beds out of public hospitals could add another 5% to 10% to premia. Medical inflation adds between 10% and 15% to premia. Does the Minister agree that VHI premia alone could mean increases of anywhere between 20% and 35% for its 1.5 million customers on top of normal market variations over the next five or six months?

Does she further agree that if VHI has to increase its reserves to the levels held by other insurance providers that could add another 5% or 10% to premia? I would like her to tell me this, since VHI is a semi-State organisation. The CEO has increased premia by 12.5% in each of the past two years. He has made public statements on some of the figures that I am using here to the effect that premia have risen as a result of Government policy and medical inflation. Why has VHI not yet announced how much premia will increase by next year? Has that been subject to political influence because of the approaching general election and because the Government has made such a mess of the private health insurance market that the customer and patients with private health insurance are to be hammered?

The Minister was very unclear regarding the co-location plan and what the Competition Authority and her own group intend. We cannot distinguish fact from rumour, for example, whether VHI is to be broken up. The Minister has said nothing about whether serious plans exist to split the services that VHI provides. The market is incredibly muddled and those getting the rawest deal are private patients. What happened with BUPA was anticipated and has caused untold worry for its customers. What is happening now will do the same for Quinn Direct and VHI private patients. They will be hammered by the cost of premia, since the Government has lost direction and does not know what it is doing regarding the private health insurance market. The Minister should explain to us her exact plans to keep premia down.

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