Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

They did. The Minister should speak to those involved with the NTPF. It was a success but the previous Minister for Health, Deputy Reilly, created a different agency and he employed people who had contracts overseas. They did not even pay tax in this country. The exercise went nowhere. Essentially, the Government undermined the NTPF at a time when it was making inroads. The idea of purchasing treatment was long with us but the parties opposite stopped doing it, with negative results for a range of patients. For example, the situation with paediatric scoliosis is a scandal that has gone on too long. There was warning after warning about this.

The health committee should be meeting much more frequently than is currently the case in order to deal with these issues. Last year it took a full 12 months to decide to provide €500 million to the health service. The Taoiseach knew at the beginning of the year that the health budget was a fraud, just as he knew it was a fraud at the beginning of the previous year. It was deliberately underestimated to enable the Government to budget for other areas. The Government is not being fair to the health service or the people who work in it. This is why morale is at an all time low in all health sectors.

We know from last year's health budget that the Minister for Health has spent an additional €70 million. While I was in Carlow-Kilkenny in the last several weeks, I was amazed by the number of owners of nursing homes who told me they were waiting 12 weeks or longer for fair deal scheme applications to be granted. Last month the Taoiseach indicated that the waiting time was four weeks. I learned from the nursing homes I visited that the waiting time in the south east is 12 weeks. That is an appalling scandal.

Does the Taoiseach agree that the health committee should be meeting more frequently given that waiting lists are out of control, the trolley issue has not been addressed and that we have no information on the Taoiseach's favoured Dutch model of universal health insurance? The Dutch model was Fine Gael's great promise at the time of the general election. The Dutch Prime Minister was forced to miss an EU summit in order to deal with a crisis in the funding of that country's health insurance system. The White Paper appears to have been sidelined and we have not seen any costings for this model. Can the Taoiseach indicate when he intends to publish the costings and can he confirm that the health committee will be meeting more often? Will he be in a position to publish the costings before the end of this session and, in particular, the fees that people will incur in purchasing insurance? Universal health insurance will entail significant taxes for a large proportion of the population. I ask the Taoiseach to outline the numbers who will be paying for health insurance and how much they will be paying.

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