Oireachtas committee hits the easy targets in health reform

When you have a broken system, it can often only make things worse to tinker around with it. Either you scrap it and start again, or be very careful about tweaking it.

This is certainly the case with the recommendation of the Oireachtas Committee on the future of healthcare that tax relief on health insurance should be scrapped.

The committee, chaired by Roisin Shortall, recommends that public money should only be spent in the public interest and for public good. That is a reasonable principle if you wanted to design a brand new health system.

But applying it to a €200 per year tax relief on health insurance will only backfire.

First of all, half of the population pay for private health insurance. The reason the figure is so high is not because they are all loaded but because the public system is so unreliable and poor.

Losing the tax relief could affect the numbers on health insurance. This would increase the burden on the public system. It would also ensure that fewer people are paying the community-rated private health insurance pot, which in turn would cause private cover to keep going up.

The State collects a levy on health insurance policies, so fewer customers would mean a fall in State revenue from the levy. Public hospitals are increasingly dependent on the income from private patients.

Surely it would be better to build model for a new system from the ground up. That might mean ensuring we had an adequately funded and efficient public system. That would cost a lot of money and require taking on some very tough public sector vested interests. That would be politically challenging.

Therefore the committee is taking an easy way out by penalising further, those it perceives to be well off.