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

Is it not a fairly stinging indictment of the strategy and work of the health sub-committee and of this Government's policy on health that the nurses, who want to care for people, feel forced to go out on strike next week because of the utter disaster in emergency departments? Is that not just about the most serious indictment one can have? Today, according to Trolley Watch, there are 411 people on trolleys across the country, suffering that indignity when they should be in beds.

It is interesting that the Taoiseach uses the word "recovery". The 50,000 people who are waiting over a year on waiting lists to get into hospitals will not be recovering from the real physical pain or ailments they are suffering from because of an utterly unacceptable situation. Some people are waiting far longer than that. I am dealing with several cases of elderly people who have worked all their lives and who need hip replacements. It will take 18 months, but that is after they have managed to get a consultant's appointment to get on the list. In reality, people will have to suffer chronic pain for two and a half years. This situation is getting worse. There is no recovery for them, just pain. They cannot believe, when they hear the Taoiseach talk about recovery, that this is the reality they are suffering.

This sub-committee, in its strategy to resolve the mess that is our health service, has failed disastrously because the Government pursued this notion of universal health insurance, which it has now accepted is a fantasy that will never materialise. Those of us who said from the beginning that the health insurance model for solving the crisis in our health system was always going to be expensive and would not work have been vindicated. What we have asked all along is for the Government to look at the National Health Service single-tier model, as the most effective way to deliver healthcare for everybody. It does not involve the profit-taking of private health insurance companies or private for-profit interests essentially sucking money and resources out of a health service. What we need is a not-for-profit universal national health system. That is how we will deliver the desperately needed healthcare to people on those lists and end the indignity of people sitting on trolleys for hours and days in our hospitals every day of the week.

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