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

I want to set out my stall from the outset. It is no secret that People Before Profit and I do not believe in a two-tier health system. Even though we have a two-tier health system, I think the vast majority of people in this House do not believe in that system any more. If you look at other countries around the world that have a universal healthcare system, the outcomes are much better. The Minister of State can call me old fashioned or out of date but my party and I are ideologically driven by that and in favour of universal healthcare. That is why we will not vote for this Bill. It compounds the inequalities in our health system.

I understand that the Health Insurance Acts have to be renewed every year to bring a sense of solidarity and equality into private healthcare. The inequality in this is that we need to examine is the question of why people need to get private healthcare in the first place. Many Deputies have said that half of the population in this country have access to private healthcare and you would have to question why that is so. If you put the facts on the table it is clear that the vast majority of people believe in public healthcare and they also pay for it. The reason people take out private health insurance is that they believe they will be waiting X amount of months or years for access to public healthcare. That is correct, and Governments have allowed that to happen. Once a parallel system is in place in healthcare or in any area, you will have inequality. That inequality cannot be escaped once that parallel system is in place. Vast amounts of money are spent each year on public funding of private healthcare. This money drifts off and I argue there is no cost or social exchange to that. This is at the heart of a system that has gone wrong.

I want to go back to last year when the State took over 19 of the private hospitals in the State. I hope that in the future there would be no such thing as private healthcare, as people having to jump the queue or as people having to seek out private healthcare. There should be one system of healthcare. I do not know if the Minister of State believes in that personally or on a political basis but all evidence shows that where a healthcare system is universal and there are no stages to it the outcomes are much better.

The NHS in Britain is revered more than the royal family. It was founded after the Second World War because of what the British working class went through during the six years of that war. If the NHS had not been set up, there would have been a revolution in Britain because working people had enough of suffering and wanted a cradle-to-grave public healthcare system.

Many things have changed over the past 18 months. This public health emergency has showed us many things good and bad, but mostly good. Humanity has stepped up to the plate and public medicine has done so as well. Many things have gone wrong that cannot be fixed here, but one of the main effects of the ongoing public health emergency is that people and governments are asking themselves many questions. They are asking what is the right thing to do and what people want most from life and society. Some of those questions emanate from the last general election, which was defined by a number of issues, the main one being public service and our health system in particular. When asked if they want a health service that delivers, regardless of whether patients are on social welfare or millionaires, the vast majority of people in this country will say that they want a health system for all. The qualities of solidarity and equality that are the main thrust of most healthcare systems in Europe place them at the cutting edge.

I do not know if Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil can ever change their ideology. I do not think so because they are embedded in the market system of healthcare. On a personal level, the Minister of State might agree with me that there is no basis for a two-tier health system but actions and words must match. We can talk about Sláintecare, which is a good policy, but is it largely aspirational? We will see. We have been talking about a universal health care system for many decades but people will be judged by their actions. Can we deliver for the citizens of this country a system of universal healthcare? I believe fundamentally that Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil in government cannot do that. Once we have private healthcare in our system, we will always have inequality. That is why we need transformative change in how politics is done in this country. Unfortunately, that will not happen with Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil in government.

See this speech in context