Up to one and a half million people use the Voluntary Health Insurance organisation in the hope of getting more immediate attention to health problems than if they were depending only on the public Health Service.
It really does beggar belief that the Fianna Fail / Green Party government has agreed to privatise it at this time.
We are in the midst of a world wide economic crisis which has been massively exacerbated by the neo-liberal mania for liberalisation, deregulation and privatisation that has been pushed relentlessly for nearly three decades up to the recent crash.
Two of the principal components of this government, Fianna Fail and Minister for Health, Mary Harney, have themselves been the authors of disastrous privatisations which finished up doing enormous damage to the economy and the provision of infrastructure. When they privatised our telecommunications industry, they allowed it into the hands of freebooting capitalists who sweated the company for short-term profits and disastrously failed to install vital crucial investment in new infrastructure such as broadband. Many areas of the country are still suffering as a result with consequent effects on the creation of jobs.
Equally disastrous was the privatisation of Team Aer Lingus, a highly skilled, aircraft maintenance company. Handing it over to multinationals in search of private profit, they laid the basis for the savage decision of its last owners to close the company now known as SR Technics last year, destroying 1,300 jobs in the process and destroying a critical infrastructure for an island nation.
If it is not prevented from doing so, the government will now offer the VHI to the sharks in the finance and insurance markets. Their primary concern will be whether they can squeeze maximum profits from the health of human beings. In view of the role these markets played in creating the crisis around the world, it is simply grotesque that the Irish government would deliver to them so much control over the health care of our people.
Supporting the privatisation of the VHI is another act of treachery by the Green Party which, when in opposition, used to be strongly critical of the Fianna Fail / Progressive Democrat government’s policy on Health. They claimed to support communities which were fighting the downgrading of local hospitals in the name of efficiency while at the same time Ms. Harney and former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern were opening private clinics in the same regions.
Minister Harney attempted to justify the privatisation by pretending that it was in the interest of the clients of the VHI and was related to the need to have a proper community rating so that older and sicker people were subsidised by others. The Taoiseach Brian Cowen even had the temerity to say that “the principle of solidarity should apply in private health insurance as well as in public health services.” Solidarity is one human attribute that finds no home among those who jostle for market share even when what they are jostling over is the health of human beings.
The response of the Fine and Gael and Labour parties to the privatisation amounts merely to some perfunctory and routine critical remarks. How could it be otherwise? Fine Gael policy is to give massively more power to private insurance companies in the Health Service as stated baldly in Faircare, its blueprint for Health: “At the moment Ireland has two administrative systems for health – one public (the HSE) and one private (the insurance companies) …Over time these two systems will become one, run by the insurance companies.” ( FairCare, page 7.)
Labour’s policy, also, is to have a major involvement of insurance companies in their preferred system.
The VHI privatisation announcement was a one day news story in the establishment media. That is not surprising since most media support a privatisation agenda. However, the members of the VHI should take a different view and strongly oppose the government move. They should not be fooled that this will somehow lead to lower premium payments. The opposite will be the case.
Minister Harney and Fianna Fail have wreaked massive damage on the public Health Service in this State. At every opportunity, they have facilitated privatised medicine entrenching an unjust two-tier system. Giving more latitude to private insurance companies will do even more damage.
The alternative is a one-tier system funded adequately by the taxation system and open to all on an equal basis. The workers in the insurance companies can be integrated into this, playing a somewhat different role. Crucial to transforming the quality of the care provided would be bringing the frontline health workers to the heart of a democratic coordinating structure which should also include patients.
This would also eliminate the waste of resources involved in private insurance companies competing with each other. It would also mean that the resources hived off in private profits made by medical corporations would instead be going to boost investment in the service.
CHECK OUT OTHER RELATED ARTICLES:
- Re-Print: Fine Gael’s new Health Policy a Charter for Privatisation
- Privatisation of VHI as discredited as that of Telecom Eireann and Team Aer Lingus
- Joe Higgins: “Fine Gael’s new Health Policy a Charter for Privatisation”
- Joe from the US: Health Service Needs a Revolution
- Joe Higgins signs IDEA pledge on health & environmental policies
