Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

"You have cancer" is probably one of the worst things that any person is going to hear from the health service. One of the next worst sentences that anybody will hear in the health service is being asked if one has private insurance or public insurance. If you have private insurance, you are likely to get an appointment in the next fortnight for your condition but if you just have public insurance, you are likely to be put into a lottery and will never know when you will be reached. Another aspect of this is that, typically, it is going to be the same doctor, hospital and treatment that is received by both patients. It is just that one is prioritised and the other is deprioritised.

A scandal emerged in 2019 when the VHI stated that it would be offering new drugs to its members for the treatment of advanced melanoma, breast cancer and lung cancer. Professor John Crown kicked up a serious fuss at the time.

This was the first time the State was going to allow private patients to receive a cancer drug but refuse access to it for public patients. Professor Crown quite poignantly and publicly asked the Government what he should say the following day in his clinic to breast cancer patients in the public system who could not have access to this particular drug. In the week the scandal broke, my office was contacted by a woman who was suffering from stage 3 breast cancer. She was receiving therapy and treatment in hospital. She developed an allergy to a particular drug and, as a result, she was left in limbo without treatment for some time. Her family was deeply upset by the news that the alternative drug was available in another hospital up the road but was not available to that young mother in the public hospital. We in Aontú fought hard for that woman. Thank God she is in remission now.

We need to know if that to which I refer has come to an end. Are treatments available to some citizens and not to others in the State? The facts of the matter are quite incredible. There is a 12% differential in the survival rates for breast cancer between the public and private systems. If 100 women are diagnosed with breast cancer while in private hospitals, seven of them will sadly die according to the statistics. If, however, 100 women are diagnosed in public hospitals, 19 of them will die. That is according to the most recent statistics from the Department of Health. That is incredibly wrong. It means that 12 women extra out of 100 will die because they are in the public system, which is absolutely criminal. We cannot persist with a situation that allows such an economic and life expectancy divide to exist in this country. According to the statistics from National Cancer Registry Ireland, lung cancer survival rates are also significantly worse in the most socio-economically deprived groups compared to the least socio-economically deprived groups. Again, there is a massive divide.

We in Aontú have introduced a Bill that will be debated on 17 February. I hope the Government will support it. If passed, it will mean that there will no longer be parking costs for patients in hospitals. This will relieve some of the economic pressure that is currently faced by patients. We do not have a cure for cancer, but we should be doing the best we can to reduce the fatalities caused by cancer. If a woman in Sweden is diagnosed with breast cancer, she is 7% more likely to survive for five years than a woman diagnosed with breast cancer in Ireland. In Britain, someone diagnosed with cancer is 5% more likely to survive for five years than someone diagnosed in Ireland. We need an all-Ireland approach to this matter. Currently, some Covid-19 antivirals are available in the North but not in the South. This is of particular concern to some haemato-oncology patients who are particularly vulnerable to Covid. I call on the Government to address this.

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