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Marie O’Connor’s Article.

Last week, Marie O’Connor, author of ‘Emergency - Irish Hospitals in Chaos’ and PRO of the national group HSAG (Health Services Action Group) and Deputy Caoimhghin O’Caolain TD attended a conference organised by the Adelaide Hospital Society and the Department of Public Health and Primary Care, TCD, to debate the idea of Universal Healthcare’. Mary Harney spoke at that conference and what she had to say is vitally important for all of us and we should be very frightened - first of all because she said it and secondly that no national newspaper, radio or TV seems to have realised the consequences of what she promised for the Irish people because they allowed it all to go without as much as a whisper. However the two attendees above have given us a comment on what she had to say and the conference generally and we exhort everyone to read it carefully and be aware of what is coming down the line to us.

Marie O’Connor’s Article is following here and you can access Caoimhghin O’Caolain’s article HERE.

‘’The Eureka moment came at the end of a long, tiring and uninspiring day. We are addressing eligibility issues, said the Minister, ominously. They are ‘a hangover’ from the health boards, it seems.
Exit the 1970 Health Act. New legislation replete with ‘modern concepts’, such as ‘health need’, is on its way. Minimum benefits are also going to be rewritten to include primary care services. But only for non-medical card holders, presumably.
Take physiotherapy, which is currently free of charge in hospital outpatient clinics. In primary care centres, however, physio comes at price (except for medical card holders). The Minister intends to rectify this descrepancy. There will be no more free physio, she implied, for non-medical card holders. Free outpatient physio amounts to nothing less than a ‘a perverse incentive’ for people to use hospital physio services. So this is one entitlement that gone for its tea. And there will be many others, if the Minister for Hardship gets her way.
Non-medical card holders are not legally entitled to services free of charge in primary care centres, she said, after being pressed by a health journalist. So now we know: hospital services now provided free of charge to all comers are being replaced by community or primary care services that carry a price tag.
The Minister is a fan of ‘co-payments’. This means the punter pays, 50 cents on a prescription here, 100 euro on an A&E visit there, and, under the UnFair Deal, for some, up to 15 per cent of the family home (after they die). Co-payments, the Minister believes, have a role from a ‘utilisation’ point of view. Forcing patients to pay is a strategy
to get them to behave differently. To get them to spend their money in the private sector, for example. Take A&E: if you have to pay anyway, you may as well skip the queue and go privately, as long as you only have a pain in your big toe.
A man from Tallaght Hospital asked her where her priorities would lie, if things get worse. You should procure services from wherever, she told the Tallaght Hospital man, forgetting that the hospital was already sending its letters to the Far East to get typed in order to save money. In order to preserve patient confidentiality, however,
these letters do not carry patients’ names or addresses, so these have to be attached to them in Tallaght. (Now if only Tallaght could send the letters it gets from GPs to the Far East to be opened, that would help to clear the hospital’s backlog of unopened letters.)
The Minister gave us an intriguing glimpse of our future health system. She wants to reduce ‘engagements with the [public] hospital system’. A lot of health services will be delivered in people’s own homes, apparently. Central to this future are computers. This year alone, HSE has set aside €30m for health information technology. With an Information Bill coming down the tracks, computer software is more important then patient services, clearly.
Hospital standards is the third step. Licensing is on its way, it seems, but only for the public sector. Only when the public hospitals have been accredited will private for profit facilities be licensed. But accrediting all of our public hospitals could take 10 years. By then, private for profit providers will be embedded in the system, thanks to 35-year leases under co-location, among others.
The new licensing regime will give the Minister and the HSE new opportunities to beat public hospitals over the head. Financial penalties will become the norm, and may over time lead to bankruptcies in the hospital sector. Or public hospitals could simply be put out of business, as in: failure to meet EEjIT Standard 2012 II (f) (iii) shall result in termination of Service Level Agreements (to provide services to patients).
I came away from the conference on health funding with a clear idea of the ideal patient. The ideal patient will be a person who may or may not suffer from a chronic disease, other than old age. Compliance willl be his main virtue. This is a man who will monitor his own blood pressure every day and give himself a full physical examination, which he has been taught to do by a nurse. He will weigh himself on a weekly basis and fill in a computer questionnaire, also on a weekly basis, to check the state of his mental health.
The man has a chestful of medication and takes an anti-anxiety pill whenever his blood pressure goes up, which it does during a brief visit from the care assistant employed by an American health care company who doesn’t speak English and makes dreadful tea. (Traditional health professionals, such as doctors and nurses, are in very short
supply, and the caring industry, like the emergency services, have mushroomed.) Much of the man’s time is spent watching health care videos on topics such as how to avoid heart attacks. He watches these videos on a special health care channel. They are not entertaining, but the nearest hospital is 80 miles away, he doesn’t trust paramedics and there is no out-of-hours GP service. The man understands that, if he doesn’t look after his own health, he will probably die prematurely. He is computer literate, and is able to key in his health statistics, including his blood pressure readings, and email them to his local primary care provider on a weekly basis. He gets an email back advising him to refill his many prescriptions directly from the drug companies, one of whom has just given the primary care centre professionals a free trip to Disneyland’’.
You might think this is fairy tale stuff but remember that the services were taken from Monaghan without the replacement services put in place and we were told that could not happen. It did and so will the above. Be warned and remember - Marie told you so!!