Sean Barrett (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I want to mention the article in The Sunday Business Post which claimed the Department of Health opted for a dearer insurance levy. It states that the Department of Health increased the amount decided by the Health Insurance Authority as an appropriate compensation for the treatment of old people by 53% over what the referee had recommended, resulting in an increase from €190 to €290. We will soon have a distinguished sports person in the House, and I am delighted the Leader has invited him. However, I do not believe overturning referees' decisions to that degree would be accepted in any part of society.

We have to cast serious doubt on whether the Department of Health has any bona fides when it adjudicates between competing health insurance companies. The intervention in this case was disgraceful and will cost the consumer €30 million. Given the Milliman report, which the Leader kindly placed in the Oireachtas Library, we have always said in the House that this whole thing is bogus. When the Southern delegates were in Stormont last Friday, Professor Charles Normand, who previously worked at Stormont and is now at Trinity College, Dublin, and the secretariat from the North also cast serious doubt on this piece of folklore that old people need to have their health insurance compensated by other people. It seems that, more and more, it is just an excuse for the Government to keep on bailing out VHI.

We should debate the basis of subsidising health insurance companies according to customer age and the movement of all of this away from the Department of Health, which has such a dreadful record in so many ways, to the financial services regulator and the Central Bank because health insurance is a financial service. This latest intervention casts even more doubt on whether the Department of Health has ever been sincere or neutral in adjudicating between competing health insurance companies. It should not have decided to increase the amount of the independent award by 53% in a couple of months. We must address this because the result is that fewer and fewer people will take out health insurance, particularly the young, and when we have compulsory health insurance, goodness knows what it will cost if the Department of Health is in charge of the pricing.