Firstly, we need Mr McCeevy to get us out of this fiscal nightmare, where our Sunday best clothes are being taken back, packed and put away in storage, leaving us shivering in the Celtic winter.
In getting our economy back in line, it is important to be aware that the health of a nation has a direct impact on its economic health.
Many of the readers of this paper will identify with the stresses of work, travel and the lack of time for family and friends. When you fall ill, you have a reasonable expectation that you will get a quality service, and care that is centred on you. For some, this may not be the case.
We have a multi-tiered health care system - public, private and marginalised. The latter are those who receive just a little more income than the threshold for a medical card. As a result, they may deny themselves access to care often to the detriment of their own health, as they weigh the cost of a visit to a GP plus medications versus food or clothes for their children.
This year we repeat more publicly what we asked Minister McCeevy for last year.
What is needed is a targeted extension of the medical card scheme based on need. This year it is all the more important because of the impact of the post-euro inflation on these folks' cost of living and medical costs.
The Irish Patients' Association has consistently advocated the need for value for money in our health service. In securing that value, it has to be redirected to other areas of need within the health care system and not returned to central funds.
We need more beds, consultants and investment in community care. We need more accountability, updated legislation for the Medical Council to meet the needs of 21st century patients and doctors, better utilisation and standardisation of technology.
Many hospitals and doctors' surgeries have different accounting systems, software packages and so on, creating mountains of data but no knowledge harvested to effectively manage the system. Think of the medical cards for the over 70s, which included cards for those who had died and so on.
In a commercial sense, what company would survive if for every factory worker there were three or more administrators or managers supporting them?
What we need from Mr McCreevy are structural, operational and procurement efficiency targets in all Departments to allow for extension of medical cards, creation of more beds and provision of more consultants.
These are not cuts but an opportunity to reinvest in the system. A modest per cent efficiency target would yield some €475 million this year and every year!
In the wider economy, penalties for tardy delivery of capital projects instead of paying out for those inefficiencies may have made this case redundant!
We hope he can find a way to meet his party's promise at the last election and extend medical cards to 200,000 fellow citizens.
The Minister for Finance is the economic doctor to cure our fiscal ill-health. We would remind him of the words of Hippocrates: " to first do no harm."
