We’ll emig rate if our lucrative private pay is cut say medics

THE country’s top-earning doctors – some on over €250,000 a year – are threatening to quit our ailing health service and emigrate if the latest reforms restrict their lucrative private earnings.

Lobby group the Irish Hospital Consultants Association has launched a campaign to ensure private earnings continue, some of which are paid even when they never meet the patients. They claim patients’ ‘care will be set back decades’ if their earnings are curbed.

The group was lashing out against the Dáil all-party plan, revealed this week, for massive investment in health care.

The Report on the Future of Healthcare, published on Tuesday, sets out plans for free GP care and free hospital care for all, as well as cuts to or abolition of health charges. However, IHCA president Dr Tom Ryan complained that consultants would not stay if income-boosting private care was removed from HSE-funded hospitals.

Already the health service is short 400 medical specialists, 15% of the 2,400 posts that exist, and thousands of doctors are seeking back-pay on pay terms agreed ten years ago.

The IHCA warned that hundreds more would quit Ireland if they were to lose the potential for top-ups and extra earnings of over €100,000 a year in addition to their state salaries of up to €140,000.

He argued that the proposal would cut €700m annually in health insurance income to public hospitals, because private care would be gradually eliminated to bring in more equality, and this would damage services.

Dr Ryan is a specialist in intensive care and anaesthesia at St James’s Hospital, Dublin. He has been a medical consultant for the past 20 years and last year was elected as president of the IHCA.

‘There is a significant risk that the private income to public hospitals will be removed with little if any replacement funding, and that the public health system will be impoverished and risk a catastrophic failure during a future wintertime crisis as a consequence,’ he claimed.

The report envisages that private care by consultants in public hospitals will be eliminated over five years, and the joint-Oireachtas committee that produced it acknowledged that removing private care from public hospitals will be complex, and it has proposed an independent analysis to identify any ‘adverse and unintended consequences’ that may arise before the changes go ahead. news@mailonsunday.ie

Already it is short 400 medical specialists