You have to hand it to the Government. They are nothing if not ingenious. Their latest wheeze is stunning - run a system into the ground so badly that it becomes indefensible, and then use its faults to justify making people pay through the nose for it.
The proposed new scheme to charge for nursing home care brilliantly taps into the Irish zeitgeist of spend now and pay later. There is no more talk of people's rights.
The devilish cunning of it in this case is that payback happens only when you are dead.
The one simple message that Minister for Health Mary Harney has been hammering home all week is that most of us do not realise just how bad things are at the moment. Elderly people are forced to sell their homes, or to get in hock to the banks, or their children are reduced to penury - all to pay for current nursing home care.
Very true. But who, one might reasonably ask, is responsible for such reprehensible and heartless hounding of the aged, the infirm and their offspring? Surely not the very same people who now so roundly condemn their own system? It is worth delving back into the mists of time - well, the last general election in fact - to recall a solemn promise made by the current Government. It was the guarantee of a medical card, and consequently free medical treatment, to everyone over 70. The cynical among us categorised it as an attempt, stunningly successful as it turned out, to buy the election.
The rest of us, however, thought that it was an excellent scheme, and we happily bought into the rhetoric of Government ministers who said it was time to give something back from the Celtic Tiger to those whose sacrifices in leaner times had paved the way for our current bonanza.
In our naivety, we all thought that free medical care for the over-70s included being treated when they were too sick to look after themselves. This time last year, when it emerged that elderly patients' pensions were being illegally taken away from them to fund nursing home care, we realised that we had been conned.
While the Government was forced to repay these ill-gotten gains, it also moved with unseemly haste to make the pension deductions fully legal from that point on. This had previously been regarded as so politically risky a proposal that for decades no one had had the nerve to confront the secretive and illegal deductions scheme.
It was noteworthy that, in the midst of the maelstrom of criticism surrounding the stolen pensions, there were no serious objections to the principle of making all elderly people pay towards their full-time care. The flights of fancy before the previous general election about older people entitled as of right to medical care were jettisoned overnight, and the public barely seemed to notice.
It was a lesson not lost on Government. Having established the principle that elderly people should pay, it has now upped the ante and moved to the next stage by giving itself the right to get its hands on people's assets, namely their homes.
The spectre has been raised that with an ageing population, the cost to the State of caring for older people will become astronomical, and thus unsustainable in the long term. However, geriatricians will tell you that on the contrary, as medical advances mean healthier old people, the proportion in need of full-time care will not increase substantially.
Despite changes in Irish society, that percentage has remained remarkably stable. In the late 1960s, for instance, roughly 5 per cent of those over 65 were in long-stay care. Today, it is 4.6 per cent. There has, however, been one significant shift. In the 1960s, four out of every five beds for long-stay elderly care were in the public sector. Now, over half of the beds are provided by private interests, whose primary motivation is profit.
Remarkable, is it not, that during a period four decades ago when the country was so impoverished, we managed through State care to look after most of those elderly people in need, without making them give up part of their houses?
It is profoundly disturbing how little public discussion there has been on this issue. The Government lists numerous reports on the care of the elderly, but this hardly qualifies as debate, particularly as none of them involved widespread public consultation with the stakeholders involved.
Their conclusions on how to fund nursing home care varied widely. The Mercer Report in 2002, for instance, strongly favoured a social insurance scheme, a kind of extension of PRSI, with care available without additional charge to everyone who needed it.
Interestingly, this report ruled out the idea of a tax on people's estates (which is effectively what has now been introduced). An estate tax, it stated, "would not garner sufficient public or political acceptance to be a viable policy option".
Mary Harney cannot say she wasn't warned.