Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

A publicly delivered universal health care service should obtain in society and it should be a right of every citizen to have comprehensive health care of the highest quality paid for from general taxation. There should be one health service of the highest quality for all. On the contrary, in our society we have a two-tier, totally unjust health service. The wealthy, who grow wealthier by the year despite austerity and recession, have no worries because they can buy anything they want in terms of health care. Many working people on modest to middle incomes, which are also modest considering the outlays, and many families are not eligible for the medical card. A certain level of care, which the medical card guarantees, exists only to a certain degree. Modestly paid workers in the private and public sectors who do not have medical cards feel constrained, frightened and psychologically coerced to take out private health insurance because of the serious lack in the health service in the State. The destruction and damage wreaked on our health service in the 1980s - in a period of capitalist crisis with attempts to resolve it by savaging the living standards of ordinary people and the axing of the public sector - still has not been repaired. We are way behind the better European states in terms of health expenditure.

Workers with modest to medium incomes are paying direct and indirect taxes and private health insurance is another kind of tax. The Government says it is moving to the universal health insurance system, the model laid out a few years ago by the Fine Gael Party in its new health policy, which provides for the wholesale privatisation of health care, giving enormous power to private health insurance companies within health facilities and hospitals. We should have the information tonight. Does the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources, Deputy Rabbitte, have the information? I know he does not have a clue because it is not his area of responsibility but the Minister for Health should be here and he should have this information. How many people will be affected by this measure? The Government should have got information from the insurance companies in respect of the type of premia and their wages. We should have a profile of the people, particularly those on modest to middle incomes, affected by this measure. I would support measures such as this if we had a comprehensive, publicly delivered health service of the highest quality for every individual; we do not. This is another grab instead of real tax income being increased and ploughed into our health services and other areas of society. As some of us are sick of pointing out, every 1% increase in a new wealth tax that should be put on the top 1% will bring in more than €500 million a year.

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