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

Private health insurance is a fundamentally parasitical enterprise. It preys on the fears of people about the prospect of being ill and needing care and the inability of the public health system, for which they pay through their taxes, not being able to provide them with that care. This is a shameful enterprise that, week in week out, with wall-to-wall advertising on the radio, plays on those fears to profit from a fundamentally unequal health system, and from what is euphemistically known as the two-tier system. As I have said many times in the House, it just absolutely drives me round the twist listening to advertisements about going to the accident and emergency department at the Blackrock Clinic or to the Beacon Hospital if people can pay. If people cannot pay, they must line up on a trolley in St. James's Hospital for the rest of the day and maybe into tomorrow, or go to St. Vincent's hospital for hours and hours, or wait years for vital operations.

Incredibly, some people wait four years for cataract operations and people in chronic pain needing hip replacement wait two years. Children needing scoliosis operation wait months longer than they should have to, and in some cases wait up to two years. All the while, somebody is making money out of it. In fact, the worse the situation is in the public health system, the more there are waiting lists, and the longer those lists are, and the more accident and emergency units are overcrowded, the more these private health care operators stand to profit. It is really sick. I accept that in a sick, unfair, fundamentally unequal health system such as this, the Bill is a very moderate attempt to level an unequal playing field through risk equalisation and community rating. Of course, it is simultaneously propping up the whole market, as the Minister calls it. This is another thing that drives me mad. I do not know how many references the Minister made to the market for health.

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