No excuses left for this sad excuse for a health service
THE Government claims there is no easy way to end the trolley crisis, which annually goes from bad to worse. But it is wrong. If every minister and all politicians as well as their families were barred from taking out private health insurance on taking office, the trolley and waiting list crisis would be tackled within months.
That is not to say that 600 plus sick people waiting on trolleys doesn’t concern ministers – it does, but it doesn’t affect them.
If Health Minister Simon Harris bangs his head while hiding under the bed he will see a doctor immediately at a private clinic. And if he, or any of his Cabinet colleagues, need hospital treatment a bed will be found for them straight away.
The trolley crisis for most of our politicians is something that happens to others and, like winter storms, must be weathered until it passes.
When I started writing this column 12 years ago the then health minister Mary Harney declared a national emergency – even though back then the number of people facing treatment delays was just a fraction of what it is now.
Because this dreadful situation has gone on for so long the public has slowly come to accept the unacceptable. What was once considered chaos is now normal – and that’s the way the Government likes it.
Be it homelessness and the abject failure to build any social housing or a health service that is only ever a few hours from crisis, the people have become conditioned to what they believe is inevitable.
Just a few years ago there was widespread shock when it was disclosed there were more than 300 people waiting on trolleys.
The health minister of the day, Dr James Reilly, brushed down his best excuses and waited for the crisis to pass – and Leo Varadkar did likewise when he held that office.
It has now got to the stage where there are no excuses left. When the 600 barrier was breached last year the public was told it was going to get worse, and it has.
Simon Harris last night issued an apology while warning against the spread of the deadly flu virus.
Simple Simon said: “The situations (patients) are in are not acceptable, but what we need to do is come up with solutions.”
He and Fine Gael have had seven long years to come up with solutions – why wait until the onset of a possible flu epidemic to find them?
How come solutions were found to sort out the country’s bankrupt banks Harney with the Dail even sitting all night to make sure their health was protected?
It wouldn’t do if a bank went down, think of what might happen to their big salaries and pensions – that might well have been the reason for staying up all night.
But it’s not only Fine Gael who are to blame, the Labour party must shoulder much of the responsibility for what the Irish Medical Organisation (IMO) described as not “a trolley crisis” but “a system in meltdown”.
Together with Fine Gael in the infamous austerity coalition Labour put the health of the banks before the actual health service by taking upwards of 1,600 beds out of the system.
When the vultures were being invited into the country the doctors and nurses were forced to go in the other direction, with thousands emigrating in the space of a few years.
The health service was literally plundered to help those who caused the crash. The annual interest on the loans to cover the debts of the rotten financial institutions would have paid for a health service comparable to that of Norway or Germany.
Former finance minister Michael Noonan claimed not accepting €13billion tax owed to us by Apple is “not in the best interests of the country”.
In other words, using billions of euro to provide thousands of new beds and the legions of doctors and nurses to service them might damage the country’s economic health.
But this doesn’t make sense because if the economy is expanding rapidly, why is the number on hospital trolleys growing even faster?
The reality is the trolley crisis is not really a medical problem, it is an ideological one where looking after the corporates is more important than looking after patients. CHARLIE Haughey survived many political assassination attempts during his career but now we find MI5 allegedly planned an actual one. Declassified records from his office show while he was Taoiseach in 1997 he was told by loyalist paramilitaries that MI5 had ordered his murder. Although not averse to murdering innocent Catholics SOMETHING strange happened on New Year’s Day – there was an unintentional funny moment on Mrs Brown’s Boys.
Naturally enough fans of the show are not happy.
The new Rory, played by Damien Mckiernan, had the rest of the cast doubled up with laughter when he and showbands, the UVF wrote to Haughey claiming they were no longer willing to work for the British “Dirty Tricks Department”. Strange there has not been a peep out of politicians of any party about a plot by a supposedly friendly country to murder our prime minister. Imagine if it had been the IRA rather then MI5? Leo’s spinners would have been called in off their Christmas hols. forgot who he actually was and instead looked to see “Rory”. This outbreak of humour was too much for some fans, who now want the new boy to be kicked off the show. Only with Mrs Brown’s Boys could there be calls for an actor to be fired for doing something that made people laugh.