Private hospitals and healthcare policy

Sir,– I note the Minister for Health has criticised the private hospitals for not agreeing to help out with the annual overcrowding A&E crisis due this winter (News, September 25th).

Is it not unusual for a Minister for Health to fail to appreciate that it is the politicians, albeit his predecessors in Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats, who orchestrated the boom in the delivery of for-profit private hospitals in Ireland over two decades by provision of large tax breaks to investors, in an effort to deal with what seemed to be the intractable problem of overcrowding and large waiting lists in our public hospitals? This policy was enacted despite international research that strongly suggested this was not the correct way to solve public hospital system problems. Time has since confirmed this folly. Investor-owned private hospitals are primarily interested in making profits and not bailing out the inadequately planned, resourced and infrastructured public hospital system that has been ongoing for decades. In addition, the Minister has suggested that these investor-owned private hospitals should accept a reasonable profit. I doubt investors in such hospitals would see it that way.

It is ultimately the politicians who are responsible for the inadequacy of our hospital system as it is they who introduced voluntary private health insurance in the 1950s that has resulted in Ireland having one of the most inequitable hospital services in the OECD, based on OECD research in the early 2000s, and it is politicians who decided to provide tax breaks to for-profit hospitals rather than invest heavily in public hospital infrastructure. The Minister might not be where he is now if the right policies on healthcare had been implemented in the past 30 or more years; to expect investor-owned and indeed not for profit private hospitals to solve loss-making public hospital A&E services on an ongoing basis may be an ask too far. – Yours, etc,

Dr JOHN BARTON,