Billy Kelleher (Cork North Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this Bill which we will support. We have been calling for many of the measures announced in the Bill with regard to lifetime community rating and the need to ensure there is risk equalisation that is fair and supports those who most need it.

While we welcome the Bill, it comes against a backdrop of great uncertainty about the Government’s policy on health insurance in general. It opposed risk equalisation in the past. It was vehemently opposed to the concept whereby the market would support those who most need it, older people and those with illness. We welcome its recent conversion.

The broader issue of where we are with regard to the roll-out of universal health insurance, which is still a central plank of Government policy on funding health care in the years ahead, is central to this debate. We are still unsure of what the Government intends to do. I believe that it wants to slowly abandon this policy, to judge by the Minister’s language and tone. He speaks about “universal health care” and universal health insurance has been dropped from his vocabulary. Can we have clarity on that because it is critically important that we know what the Government intends doing? The industry and society deserve an honest appraisal of what it intends to do with regard to universal health insurance. If it was committed to the fictional universal health insurance model it espoused prior to the election, we would not be discussing community lifetime rating at all because everybody would have to take out health insurance. This Bill seems to accept that we will not be going down the road of universal health insurance. How we fund our health services and provide the care that is required every day is critically important to the insurers, to those who wish to take out private health insurance and to others who cannot afford it or have an ideological objection to it so that they can make up their own minds. How we fund health services in the years ahead is central to our debate. It is evident from the context and content of this Bill that the Government is slowly but surely abandoning its universal health insurance model.

Significant resources were spent on that approach, for example, when people were sent abroad to examine the various models that are in place throughout the world. There was a commitment to publish a White Paper on universal health insurance. We were told there would be a consultative process.

I assume the Bill before the House is an indication that this policy is being abandoned. The reason it is being abandoned is very clear, to be political on this matter for a moment. Fine Gael has clearly made a calculated decision. It has realised that if it pursued the universal health insurance model espoused by the previous Minister for Health, it would be asking its supporters to pay their taxes and private health insurance premiums before being informed when the health insurance model came into being that everybody was on the same list together. Obviously, Fine Gael's supporters would not accept that. I assume the universal health insurance model is slowly being abandoned because it would not offer preferential treatment to people with private health insurance.

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