John Crown (Independent) | Oireachtas source

It has just been announced that 2,000 people are waiting for hospice services due to an appalling lack of hospice beds and I must say that puts everything else we will say today into perspective.

I would like two issues of conflict of interest addressed. One is a specific query for the Leader to address to the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, Deputy Richard Bruton, because having studied it over the past day or two days, I greatly fear the new forum the Minister for Health, Deputy James Reilly, has set up to look at the private health insurance market has very serious issues in terms of competition law and conflict of interest.

The Minister correctly identified the fact there is a need to reign in the costs paid by private health insurers if the sector is to survive and has basically instituted a forum led by the person who was in charge of the hospitals office in the HSE which, on the one side, is a service provider for the individual insurance companies. It will be constituted by representatives of the insurance companies, one of which is a company - VHI - with one shareholder, who is the Minister for Health. Three others are voluntary insurance agencies run on behalf of people who work for organs affiliated with the State and others are wholly private insurance entities, one of which - Aviva Insurance - is, as I pointed out in the House last week, increasingly representing a high end scam rather than an insurance company. This company has agreed to pay for crazy treatments, such as homoeopathy which has no basis in science, while subjecting treatments which are proven to work, such as treatments for malignant melanoma, to cost benefit analyses, to which it has never subjected homoeopathy. The reason is that the cost per year of lives saved from homoeopathy would be infinity because it does not save any lives and yet this company is allowed to sell insurance semi-fraudulently in our market.

For the Minister for Health to get these companies to work together to form a unified force ostensibly - I should not say "ostensibly" because he means well in this - to reduce costs is giving them a licence to form a cartel. That is exactly what is happening. It is wrong and it needs to be investigated. We need those companies to compete on the basis of cost and not to collude to deny their patients access to treatments while at the same time strong-arming the service provider.

The second issue of conflict of interest relates to the Magdalen laundries. With the greatest respect to our former colleague, Dr. Martin McAleese, I am very troubled by a conflict of interest in the activity of the laundries. The report stated that the entities which ran the laundries did not profit from them. The laundries were providing a service to other organisations which the same religious orders were running. Were they doing it at a commercial rate or, in effect, were the laundries subsidising the for-profit activities of these other entities? There is a real potential for a conflict of interest here and I believe, with respect, that the original report was inadequate in the way it dealt with the activities of the religious orders which were running the laundries. This aspect needs to be looked at because the issue-----