Sir, – I have been reading the revelations about the Irish healthcare system over the past weeks with a growing sense of despair, disgust and anger.
It is obvious at this point that money is infecting the entirety of the Irish health system. This is manifesting itself in outrageous price increases for private health insurance, in some children waiting in pain for surgery in the public system, while children with richer parents are seen much more quickly, in families being charged thousands of euro for private neurodiversity assessments because public waiting lists are too long, in medical professionals who are supposed to be proving universal healthcare seeing it as acceptable to sell private healthcare.
The ancient Greeks had a word for all of this, pleonexia, which means that a desire – or let’s call it what it is in a lot of cases, greed – for money begins to infiltrate the entirety of a system.
Under the third United Nations Sustainability Goal, all people in Ireland have a right to a healthy life and access to healthcare. The State has committed itself on paper to attempting to achieve universal healthcare.
READ MORE
But you know, the best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour. Ireland killed universal healthcare in the 1950s while talking about fairness and justice.
In the 2020s Ireland continues to talk about things like sustainability, fairness and justice in relation to healthcare, while the reality is that women who are pregnant feel that they have to pay for continuity of care, while the reality is that huge numbers of people, including children, are kept in states of pain and suffering because they cannot afford to pay to skip the queue. And [this] while the reality is that profiteering by different groups in the health system is not only tolerated but in many cases encouraged.
Ireland has a health system that, for many, has become a system of economic horror. What a public-private divide means, by definition, is that some people will be kept in a state of pain while some people will be allowed to become pain-free.
This is literally the implication of a public-private divide of the type that Ireland has. We have to face up to this. It is only by accepting and then rejecting pleonexic forces within the Irish health system that we will have a chance to create something better.
We do not have to condemn our children and grandchildren to the same choice that we were forced to make: pain or payment. We need to demand universal healthcare, medical and dental care, that is free at the point of use. There are only five million people in this country. It can be done. – Yours, etc,
Dr Myles Balfe,
Department of Sociology,
UCC,
Cork.
Sir, – I’m sure the women of Ireland are, like me, grateful for Fintan O’Toole’s intervention on the private maternity care row (“Women believed they had to pay to be safe giving birth. Why? The Rotunda told them so,” June 9th). .
Well, now we have O’Toole informing us otherwise.
However, is it possible that mothers are making these decisions based on their own information, research and choice (remember that word?) or that the alternative is so bad that mothers are prepared to pay large sums for a modicum of reassurance and yes, even comfort?
A sensible, grown-up country would first fix the problems in the public maternity system before taking away the option mothers were actually happy with. In 2013, a new maternity, fully public, hospital was first proposed and, 13 years later, a sod has yet to be turned. This hospital would have gone a long way to reduce the demand for private maternity care by offering best-in-class birth, pre- and post-pregnancy care.
If consistency is key, then at least I guess we do something well in this country: consistently fail mothers and babies and then consistently tell them what to think about that. – Yours, etc,
Ashie Norris,
Churchtown,
Dublin 14.
