The drop in the numbers of people holding private health insurance due to the economic downturn should force the Government to abandon its plan to build private hospitals on public hospital sites, Labour’s health spokeswoman, Jan O’Sullivan, has said.
She said it made no sense whatsoever to pursue the controversial plan to build co-located hospitals at a time when the percentage of people with private health insurance was falling and our existing public hospitals were struggling to cope with the demands being placed upon them.
Last week the VHI said it had lost 70,000 customers in the first seven months of this year and it predicted the number of people pulling out of private insurance policies could reach 200,000 by December 2010.
While some of those who left the VHI have switched to Quinn Healthcare and Hibernian Aviva, which claim to have picked up 26,000 and 35,000 customers respectively from the VHI so far this year, the Health Insurance Authority confirmed overall numbers with health insurance fell in the first quarter of this year for the first time since quarterly figures began in 2001. The fall in the first three months of the year was by 13,000.
Ms O’Sullivan, who has always opposed the hospital co-location plan, called on Minister for Health Mary Harney to abandon it in light of the growing numbers who were losing their jobs and who would most likely have to depend on the public hospital system in future, unable to pay for private cover.
She added that the plan to spend millions on tax write-offs to deliver more private hospitals was money that could be better spent within the public hospital system.
A spokesman for Ms Harney said the whole purpose of co-location was to make greater numbers of bed places available to public patients in public hospitals.
“A public hospital situated beside a co-located private hospital will be able to relocate to that private hospital much of the private work previously done in public hospital beds. If greater numbers of people will need to be treated in the public health system, the need to relocate private patients out from public hospitals into private hospitals becomes greater, not less,” he added.