PRESSURE ON the State’s public health system is mounting and patients face poorer outcomes because of the rising costs of private health insurance, it has been claimed.
With private health insurance premiums climbing by as much as 50 per cent over the last two years, up to 6,000 people are abandoning the market each month.
Hospital consultants and patient groups have said the public health system was “already under-resourced and working at full tilt” and would struggle to cope with more private patients going public.
Other health experts have, however, played down the impact of the numbers leaving the private health insurance market and said it was unlikely to be as dramatic as many people feared.
Dr Orla Hardiman, a neurologist at Beaumont Hospital, has campaigned for years for greater investment in the public system. Yesterday she warned that “both the public and the private systems are imploding” and could be facing “an Armageddon”.
She expressed doubt that the already strained public system could cope with a major influx of patients forced to abandon their private health insurance.
She accused successive governments of incentivising the private system with tax breaks while the public health system was “chronically under-resourced”.
Dr Hardiman accepted that large numbers abandoning private health insurance would not make much difference when it came to acute care, most of which is carried out in public hospitals.
However, she said the pinch would really be felt when it came to elective procedures “which dramatically impact on the quality of people’s lives”.
Stephen McMahon of the Irish Patients Association echoed her concerns.
He said the numbers leaving the private health insurance market presented a “very serious situation”.
He described health insurance as a “safety valve” that was now under grave threat.
“You have 500 people leaving the market each week and those people will have no choice but to fall back on an already overstretched public health system. But also, as more people abandon their policies, premiums are likely to rise, which will put a burden on existing customers,” he said.
However, professor of health policy and management at Trinity College Dublin Charles Normand urged caution when assessing the impact of people opting out of the market. He said it was easy to overstate the impact.
He pointed out that the private health insurance system represented 8 per cent of the total health budget and, if one-fifth of those with health insurance started relying exclusively on the public system, it would add about 1 per cent to the pubic numbers.
“The stress of the health cuts this year will have eight times the impact that would be felt if 20 per cent of those with private health insurance left the market, so there are much bigger issues out there,” he said.
Oliver O’Connor, who was special adviser for six years to then minister for health Mary Harney, said Prof Normand made a valid point when he highlighted the relatively small amount of the health budget that came from private health insurers.
However, “another interesting comparison would be to put the €1.6 billion in private health insurance spending alongside public hospital spending of just over €5 billion, because much of the insurance money finds its way into the hospital system and that is why it is so important.”
Prof Normand accepted that in individual areas that had been poorly resourced “and where waiting lists are ridiculous, the problem is certainly likely to get worse”.