Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I am utterly opposed to a two-tier health system and utterly opposed to health care only being available to people who can afford expensive private insurance. It is anathema to me. I find it deeply worrying that the Government is committed to the universal insurance model, which is just a recipe to enrich private health care insurance companies and cost society a hell of a lot more in administration and billing costs to run the health service than in delivering front-line health services. This is clearly the case in the United States, which spends more on health than any other country but where huge numbers of people - tens of millions - have no access to health care. The so-called Dutch model is not mentioned much anymore because the evidence of increased insurance costs and the failure of the model to deliver an efficient system is piling up in Holland.

We need a national health service free at the point of demand. If we had a state-of-the-art national health service in which ordinary people have confidence, we would not need private health insurance. The vast majority of people would not seek to take out private health insurance if they had trust and confidence in the public health system. How can they possibly have trust and confidence in a public health system that is being slashed to bits year after year, with billions of euro, thousands of beds and thousands of nurses being taken out of the system? How can they possibly have confidence in it? How can they be encouraged to do anything else than, out of fear and anxiety, fork out money they cannot afford to try to cover themselves in case of ill-health? Now, the Government wants to punish them for doing so. This will punish them for being victims of the cuts the Government and previous Governments imposed on the public health system. I utterly oppose this because, although it is dressed up as being progressive, it will hit low and middle income families who struggle to provide a safety net for themselves in the case of ill-health. That they do so is understandable.

Those who oppose this measure have a responsibility to outline how we could finance the state-of-the-art national health service we could and should have. I am sure the Government will mention this in response. One way to do it is to ensure half of the money does not go into the coffers of private health insurance companies and wasted administration and billing, which is crazy when it should be spent on nurses, beds and health staff. We must ask where we get the money and this raises the question of progressive taxation. As Deputy Higgins mentioned and as some on this side of the House constantly go on about, it means looking at wealth taxes and higher income taxes for those earning over €100,000.

It means looking at corporate taxes. It means looking at financial transaction taxes. Whenever one even raises those issues, all we get from the Government and from half of the media establishment in this country is poo-pooing. They say we do not know what we are talking about and say it is "fantasy economics", because they do not want to touch the wealth of the big corporations and of the very wealthy in society, but it can be done.

Our budget submission questions to the Department of Finance confirmed, for example, that if there was 50% income tax rate on earnings over €100,000, 60% on over €150,000 and 70% on over €200,000, it would raise €1.1 billion. Would that not be fair? I think it would be fair. It would be a hell of a lot fairer than hitting the vast majority of low and middle-income families, taking their medical cards from them or hitting them with this further tax by removing this small tax break, and all the other mean and nasty income cuts and taxes the Government has imposed on them. There are many more measures, such as, as has been mentioned, the wealth tax, and even a small increase in corporate tax. Why will the Government not consider those measures instead of repeatedly hitting the low and middle-income families who are struggling and who are battered?

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