HEART BEAT:Ridiculous plans are being imposed by stealth by a discredited Minister – we never voted for this, writes MAURICE NELIGAN.
BY ANY reckoning the country is in a parlous state. The Government is about to go on holidays.
Sure all the problems will be there when they get back. I wonder if any workers will. God forbid the problems might get any worse. In any case doesn’t the whole world say they are doing a grand job?
Have a good hollier lads. You wouldn’t like to take five years off by any chance and give the rest of us a break? No; I rather feared not.
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that “In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.” I have an uneasy feeling they mightn’t know that.
I’m forever blowing bubbles
Pretty bubbles in the air
They fly so high, nearly reach the sky
Then like my dreams they fade and die.
This song is used as an anthem by West Ham football club and prompts the riddle; what have our Government and the club got in common? There are two answers – firstly, neither are much use; secondly, they share a great affinity for bubbles.
Listening to the West Ham repertoire of songs and chants rendered by such as the “Cockney Rejects” or “the Green Street Hooligans” is quite a cultural experience.
Listening to what emanates from the spin doctors of Merrion Street is likewise special. Those folk think that they could spin the Bible in such fashion as to make Beezlebub the good guy. The rate of job losses is slowing down or we didn’t lose as much last month as the month before.
Fantasy Ireland is to create four high end jobs in Ballysplash over the next 10 years. It’s a bit like congratulating somebody being hanged on the fact that they’re near the end of the drop.
West Ham fans only sang about bubbles. Our lot blew them enthusiastically. Furthermore, despite all warnings against basing our economy on the ephemeral and inconstant, we continued to do it. We are the living proof of Keynes statement “when the capital development of a country becomes a byproduct of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill done”.
All around us we see the wreckage of the housing bubble. We see the consequences of the hotel and office space bubbles and yet we’re willing to repeat the mistakes. Readily available credit, coupled with low interest rates, fuelled by plain and simple greed led the Gaderene rush to perdition.
As if the multi-hued bubbles themselves were not sufficient, the Government further aided their production by introducing a series of tax breaks for the heroes of development.
Nobody stopped to ask if we could sell all the houses or fill all the hotels or whether there were enough clients to occupy all the new offices. There was such a thing as a free lunch. We were the wonder of the western world. The trouble was many believed it. Pope wrote in his Essay on Man,
Atoms or systems into ruin hurled
And now a bubble burst, and now a world.
Now we live among the ruins. It has been and will continue to be a very hard lesson. However, some people are slow learners and incredibly our Government is hazarding a last throw of the dice or, more appropriately, a last blow of the bubble. Houses, hotels, offices, all blew up in their faces; now they’re trying private hospitals.
I was relieved to hear our Finance Minister in his budget speech announce that tax relief for private hospitals was being abolished. That was misleading, if that is the right word.
Such advantages were not being withdrawn for such ventures that had reached a certain stage. What that stage was we weren’t told. The peasantry don’t need that sort of detail.
Leaving aside the moral implications of this socially divisive agenda; let us consider the mathematics briefly. It seems to me that in the genesis of this latest bubble there is an inherent flaw.
Who is going to pay for this rash of new private hospitals? We’ve been here before with the houses, hotels and offices. The lesson is the same. There are simply not enough people carrying private health insurance to make these projects viable.
Translated into the language of these entrepreneurial saviours; the market is simply too small. That is the bottom line. Furthermore, there are not enough insurers robust enough to meet the vastly increased billing that will be required to keep these hospitals afloat, let alone make profits. This is not conjecture. It is simply awkward fact.
Health insurance bills are rising, as every subscriber knows. We are told that 40,000 people left the VHI in the first quarter of the year. These numbers will increase as recession bites deeper.
Consequently, insurers raise their prices and cut payments to doctors. Do they cut payments to private hospitals and begin to reduce benefits?
Common sense suggests that such is inevitable. This has happened in the US where President Obama is stepping in forcefully to curb the growth of profit-inspired private care.
Some of the companies involved in the provision of American healthcare are now looking for fresh markets.
In the House of Commons on February 6th, 2008, Frank Dobson, then UK Health Secretary, raised the spectre of privatisation by stealth.
“I should warn the House that there are very powerful forces at work behind the proposition and they are in the country now,” he said. “Those forces are the US health corporations and they are roaming around Europe and Britain looking for markets.”
They already have a foot in the door here aided by covert Government policies that support privatisation of health services and till the soil by running down our public system. The Irish people never voted for this. It was never proposed to them. It is being imposed by stealth by a discredited Minister.
Maurice Neligan is a cardiac surgeon