Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am not aware of any plans to cover those costs at the moment. It is not standard that we would cover the costs of private healthcare or private treatments. Sometimes we do this through the National Treatment Purchase Fund, NTPF, mechanism, for example through the cross-Border directive. If there is a prior arrangement, we can do this but we must have some checks and controls around these things. Perhaps we can give consideration to using that mechanism to pay for some people to go private in those circumstances. We would have to be careful to get that right, however, and make sure the right treatments are definitely needed and registered and all those things, which can be quite complicated.

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