Clare Daly (Dublin North, Socialist Party)

This Bill draws attention to the debacle that is the Irish health service and the role of private health insurance. I find it absolutely shocking that 47% of the population have private health insurance. That is a huge number of families who are already overburdened with other bills and who have to scrape together the means to come up with those funds. It is interesting to note that this figure has declined. Some 29,000 people no longer pay for private health insurance as a result of the recession, job losses and the increased premia that these companies are charging.

We have to examine why these families are paying thousands of euro for private health insurance. It is not unheard of for a family of four to pay about €5,000 for such insurance. It is obviously not because they hate their neighbours and they feel ashamed to share a room with somebody if they end up in hospital. The reason is that they do not have confidence they will get the treatment for themselves and their families out of the public health service. This is particularly graphic in the case of cancer care. Anybody who has been in the system knows that the centres of excellence and the public health system in dealing with cancer is better than anything that the private insurance companies could deliver, or at least equal to it. Why would anybody pay thousands to go into the private system? The only explanation is that they cannot get into the system. That has to be addressed.

Like Deputy Murphy, I would also like to mention my former colleague Susie Long, who died needlessly in 2007 because she had to wait eight months for a colonoscopy. It was an absolutely tragic situation, and we were told it would never again happen and her memory would be marked in some way. The promise at the time was there would be no distinction between public and private patients on waiting lists and people's bank balances would have nothing to do with who would be seen first. That was a lie. The number waiting for colonoscopies has increased. It has doubled since 2010 to 2,400 people. How many of those people will end up unnecessarily dead like Susie Long, because they did not have the money? The Blackrock Clinic only this month revealed to www.irishhealth.com that it has no waiting list at all for colonoscopies. People who are covered by private health insurance can get a colonoscopy at any time, but if they are not, they must come up with €1,000. Who in this day and age has €1,000? Very few people have it.

It is patently obvious that people only choose private health care because they do not have confidence that they can rely on the public system. This is madness. The whole debate exposes the madness of having for profit companies involved in the whole system of health care. We see it graphically in respect of nursing homes, where the Government is standing over the closure of public nursing homes, while at the same time driving people into private nursing home provision. It is an absolutely ridiculous situation.

The irony is that the private health insurance companies - Aviva, VHI, Quinn - all massively hiked their premiums this year. In fact, VHI did so twice. These companies are highly profitable, largely due to the Irish market in the case of Aviva. If people are willing to pay thousands of euro to these private companies for a minor advantage, then this demonstrates the point that they would be prepared to pay more in PRSI contributions if they had the confidence that they would get a decent public system. Instead, as a result of Government policies, we have moneys diverted so that the public system is run down and the private sector is boosted. That is disgraceful and is shameful of the Labour Party to participate in that.

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