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

I am sharing time with Deputy Paul Murphy. I wish to press the Minister on the issue of public and private healthcare. Given that Covid-19 will be with us for the foreseeable future, any consideration of a return to the two-tier system is untenable. The Government needs to make up its mind. Fianna Fáil seems to be somewhat sitting on the fence and even hinting that we should go back to the two-tier system sooner rather than later. I want to push in the exact opposite direction and it should not be for a few months. We need Covid-19 care, Covid-19 surge capacity and to deal with the waiting list crisis and non-Covid-19 care. The only way that can be done is to integrate all healthcare capacity, public and private, into a single system. We need to grasp that nettle now and take the private hospitals fully into public ownership, not on the basis of paying huge sums in rent to billionaires who own them but taking them over fully. Will the Minister respond?

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