Gino Kenny (Dublin Mid West, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

It is good we are having this debate because this issue affects everybody, regardless of who they are and where in the country they live. The perpetual crisis of our health system mirrors the glaring inequalities of society in Ireland today. According to public health experts, health outcomes and our general well being are deeply affected by inequality in income and inequality in access to health services. Access to health care when needed is a fundamental human right. From the moment we are born, in the course of life's challenges, somewhere along the way we will all need a health system that takes cares of us at our time of need. The Department of Health has been compared to Angola but even Angola managed to dig up its landmines and find a peace settlement to resolve the bitter civil conflict that ravaged that country.

The recent report by the Irish Cancer Society that waiting times for life-saving tests for cancer patients are up to 25 times longer for public patients than for those paying privately is distressing and shocking. The report highlighted striking differences between access for public patients and private patients, with GPs reporting that some public patients have to wait up to 480 days for an ultrasound. That means waiting for well over a year for a cancer investigation. The report also quoted an Irish College of General Practitioners report that delays in accessing diagnostics force many patients to pay for scans and tests privately to secure diagnosis and as a result, a patient's ability to pay is linked to his or her ability to access diagnostics used to detect cancer in a timely manner. The report gets to the heart of what is wrong with our health system.

I would go even further and state that this way of dealing with cancer patients amounts to negligence and a violation of a basic human right to health care. In its crudest form, those with the ability to pay can skip the queue and access early intervention for cancer and a better life outcome. Health care should not be about queueing for years. It should not be about how big a person's wallet is. It should be about the delivery of universal health care that is not based on someone's ability to pay or any discrimination based on income or social class. If it was any other form of discrimination, such as based on ethnicity or sexual orientation, this health system loophole would have been quite rightly closed down by now. It is no coincidence that successive right-wing Governments, led by Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael, have created a two-tier health system. Both parties have applied the logic of the market to water, housing, transport and health. For them profit always comes first even if, such as in the tragic death of Susie Long, patients die waiting.

Another example of Government failure in early intervention in our health service is waiting times for children with special needs. According to the reply to a parliamentary question I tabled a number of weeks ago, the average waiting time in Dublin Mid-West for a speech and language therapist is 12 to 18 months and for an occupational therapist it is 18 months to two years. These waiting times are only for assessment and do not include the further wait for treatment. This is clearly unacceptable. Children cannot be routinely expected to wait more than half their lives for intervention that needs to be made as early as possible.

Inclusion Ireland has stated that Ireland is in breach of the recommended number of children who should be assigned to each speech and language therapist. It commented that the recommended caseload size is 30 to 65 children per therapist but in Ireland the national average is an unbelievable 162 children per therapist. To meet international standards, the number of speech and language therapists working in children's disability services would have to be tripled from its current level of 283 speech and language therapists to 800. Inclusion Ireland and other agencies report that, increasingly, hard-pressed families are incurring financial hardship by having to pay for services they cannot access through the public system.

It is good that we are having this debate about the Irish health service. I hope that by adopting this motion we will make a start at abolishing the two-tier health service that is not fit for purpose. I have worked in the health service for the past 16 years. I know that the fault does not lie with the staff who are very dedicated and extremely professional in what they do. Most people will say that when they use the health service, their experience of front-line staff is incredibly positive. Having gone through numerous pay cuts and cutbacks in the past eight years, it is a testament to the dedication of health service staff that we have a functional health service. Ireland spends more on our two-tier health service than any other European country but we do not get as good a service as countries which spend more on public health services and less on private services. It is time to move away from profiteering and away from buying and selling health care for profit and follow the international evidence that one-tier publicly funded not-for-profit health care is best by far.

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