The announcement yesterday by Minister Harney and the Taoiseach that VHI will be privatised over the next two years is a further installment in this government’s destruction of the very idea of a public Health Service.
It is callously throwing hundreds of thousands of people, especially the old and the sick, to the mercy of the wolves in the insurance and finance markets of the world, for whom private corporate profit is the first consideration.
It does really beggar belief that the government is planning another instalment of a neo-liberal agenda which is utterly discredited as the economic crisis rages worldwide as a result of these policies. It is particularly sickening that the proposal is to put Irish patients at the mercy of the insurance and financial markets whose reckless gambling caused the disaster of toxic debt around the world.
Minister Harney, by underfunding the public health system has done everything she can to force people into taking out private health insurance. But the recent trend has been of people pulling out of private insurance in the context of job losses and other hardships.
The case for a unified comprehensive public health care system funded by progressive taxation and free at the point of use, eliminating wasteful competition, advertising and a multiplicity of competing administrations has never been stronger.
I support the defence of the 900 jobs in VHI and would propose that workers in the private insurance sector be integrated into the public health care system rather than further adding to the swollen dole queues.
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