Drive The Profiteers Out Of Irish Healthcare
Covid-19 has exposed just how much damage has been done to Irish healthcare by decades of right-wing ideology - an ideology that views healthcare as a commodity to be controlled, bought and sold by the private sector.
Ironically this most Thatcherite of ideologies has gained far greater political traction in the Twenty-Six Counties than it has in Britain or the British-controlled Six Counties. The Tories of the Irish political establishment have gone where the British Tories haven’t dared to go.
Instead of focusing on building a world-class public health system, successive Dublin governments have rolled out the red carpet for the health-profiteers; for hospital-owning oligarchs; for profit-driven health insurers; for a cohort of super-rich consultants who care more about their bank balances than the health of the Nation.
Denis O’Brien - a health profiteer who acquired The Beacon Private Hospital in Sandyford in 2006 after paying Ulster Bank €60m for a €100m debt.
As the profiteers control of healthcare has grown, the public health system has been deliberately run into the ground. Despite being one of the wealthiest states in the world, the Twenty-Six County public health system was already on its knees before Covid-19.
At the start of 2020 the GP and primary care system was not fit for purpose in many communities. Hospital waiting lists had soared to 680,000 cases, with almost 110,000 people waiting more than eighteen months for treatment. Acute hospitals were routinely swamped, leaving patients waiting days on trolleys for admission.
When Covid-19 arrived there were just six critical care beds per one hundred thousand people in the health system, compared to almost thirty such beds per hundred thousand people in Germany.
By any measure the public health system was hopelessly unprepared for a pandemic. It lacked the staff, the PPE and the bed capacity (both general and acute) to deal with even a minor increase in demand. And crucially it lacked the testing, laboratory and tracing capacity to track and contain the virus.
Against this backdrop it was inevitable that the state would need to bring the resources of the profit-driven healthcare sector into the fight against Covid-19. And it was equally inevitable that Fine Gael and the health profiteers would see it as opportunity to transfer yet more public money into private hands.
And so the deal was quickly done with nineteen private hospitals being paid an estimated €115,000,000 of public money per month to provide additional capacity to the public health system.
The Hermitage Clinic in Lucan, one of Ireland’s most modern hospitals is owned by the billionaire Larry Goodman.
While the private hospitals willingly entered into this generous (for them) arrangement, the same cannot be said for many of the private consultants who work within them.
By May 3rd just 240 out of 600 full-time private consultants had signed up to a deal that would see the state pay them between €140,000 and €195,000 a year to work in the public health sector for the duration of the Covid-19 crisis.
The remaining consultants, with typical earnings between €400,000 and €600,000 per year, have refused to sign up to the scheme, a position that is supported by the Irish Hospitals Consultants Association.
Many of these same consultants were educated and trained at great expense to the Irish taxpayer. Happy to take the benefits of a publicly-funded education system, they are now refusing to participate in a publicly-funded health system.
The Irish Hospital Consultants Association encouraged its private members not to sign up to the temporary Covid-19 employment scheme.
The two-tier profit-driven approach to healthcare failed long before Covid-19. It failed to provide healthcare to those that needed it most. And it failed the test of equality and justice. The pandemic has just exposed the many underlying contradictions of that failed system.
Despite all the rhetoric we aren’t all in this together. Even now, in the face of the greatest public health crisis in many decades, the health profiteers are being protected and rewarded by the Gombeen class.
For the billionaires, religious orders, vulture funds and other assorted profiteers that control so much of the Irish health system it’s still business as usual. Covid-19 is just one more opportunity to generate profit from human suffering.
During normal and extraordinary times the health profiteers need the public health system to exist in a state of perpetual failure. Without public waiting lists, trolley counts, scandals and crisis there would be no need for private hospitals, private insurance or private consultants. There would be no market place and no profits to be made.
The private health sector does not exist to compliment the public health sector as the political establishment claim. It exists to generate profit from the failings of the public health system - failings that the political establishment are responsible for.
This situation will not change until the profiteers are driven from Irish healthcare. Only then can we build a new all-Ireland single-tier public health system to deliver high-quality healthcare to all of our people.
Éirígí is calling for all privately-owned healthcare facilities to be taken into permanent public ownership. In the New Republic there will be no place for individuals or corporations to grow rich off the back of the suffering of others.