Is it time to privatise all of the Dept of Health?

the current cost for a failed Dept of health is now in the billions and counting (and thats per annum) and all for a system that has failed miserably. This cost covers everything from real healthcare, to pay, to fixed assets etc. What we need to do is transfer all of this from the Dept of Health to private industry. If it means giving the hospitals away (which we will have to do in a depression), so be it. We need as much competition between hospitals as possible. All issues regarding pay for nurses, doctors become an issue solely based on the success of a hospital. If you work in a great hospital, you should get great pay, if you dont…you should not. Take the cost of no longer having these fixed costs on the irish taxpayer and offer every irish citizen or person who is paying tax and offer a base level of health insurance. If you require more healthcare, feel free to top that amount up yourself, if you cannot afford to top up, you will have the baseline coverage. This approach ensures a number of things:

1. the dept of health is vastly reduced in size and cost and becomes a dept responsible for high standards in hospitals AND NOTHING ELSE
2. The costs of running the health industry is given to those who can run it best and failure to meet standards will result in you loosing the license to run a hospital
3. The irish govt can increase the coverage or lower the coverage and can ensure that the private heath industry does not run riot and can throttle up or down depending on fiscal issues in the govt. Hospitals charging too much will face competition from cheaper ones
4. it passes the health industry back to the people who know best what you need done…YOU and your doctor and most of all gets the govt out of our lives leaving them far less to screw up
5. the issue of pay for nurses and doctors is moved instantly to one based on achievement
6. it will stop ministers opening fancy new machines or wings in hospitals that you and i have paid for and stop them pretending to be some gracious benefactor bestowing their favours
7. We can vastly trim the govt size
8. we can offer old age pensioners or high dependency groups higher coverage for this generation while educating the next that your health is your business and not controlled by some faceless person in the dail or a union. Any monies collected from special interest groups can be given DIRECTLY to people affected rather then wasted in centrailsed organisations.

The saving from doing this will be vast for the irish taxpayer. We will instantly move from a third world health care system to one driven for success. You can take back your right as a patient to choose the hospital that best suits your needs. Queues for hospitals will vastly reduce because it is now in the interest of hospitals to get as many patients as they can. The fear of complaint of hospitals will disappear something that is ever present in our society and move heathcare away from the horrible environment we have now where patients are used as pawns in fights between govt and unions. We will all get what we can really afford as a nation and not live in the fantasyland that the dept of health actually cares what happens to a patient.

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