Once again the Irish health system is in crisis..
The current root of the problem is that the Fine Gael-Labour government thinks that it it is more important to pay off bondholders than look after Irish patients.
Consider only one aspect of the crisis – the failure to move older people out of hospitals to step down care.
There are currently over 2,000 people waiting for over 15 weeks for nursing home care. That has risen from 523 just over a year ago.
The reason is that the government has cut both home care packages and reduced the number of publicly run nursing homes.
There have been 2.3 million home help hours cut since 2008. The political establishment has also handed over much of the publicly run nursing homes to their friends in the private sector.
It would take just €90 million to clear the waiting list of access to nursing home care. But the government won’t do it. Instead they pay out €8 billion each year in interest to bondholders.
They want patients to suffer so that the needs of wealthy bondholders come first.
REFORM
Government spokespersons try to hide this reality by saying that ‘ we cannot throw money at the problem – we need more reform’.
But this is just code for saying, we want staff to give even ‘more for less’. Varadkar expressed this attitude when he called on nurses to accept an extra patient of two in each ward to help alleviate the crisis.
Nurses and health staff are already overworked because their numbers have been substantially cut. One result is that there are about 2,000 closed beds in Irish hospitals.
SOME SOLUTIONS
The health crisis is another symptom of a sick society whereby the political elite enforce suffering on the mass of people to pay off bankers debts. We need to reverse all of this and embark on a new direction.
- We should prioritise patients and invest properly in health service. That means ending the public sector embargo and recruiting nurses and other staff to open hospital beds.
- We should reverse the cuts to home helps and take the nursing homes out of the hands of private profiteers who are subsidised by taxpayers.
- We should create a national one tier health service where people are treated according to medical need not the size of their wallets or their costly insurance plans.
- We should remove the profiteering motive from health by, for example, insisting on greater use of generic medicines.
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