Use private healthcare to ease NHS waiting lists, says Shadow Health Secretary

10 comments
  1. The problem is I can’t afford both. But if I could stop paying national insurance, i would gladly give up the NHS and go 100% private.

  2. The thing is, it’s the same doctors, consultants and surgeons doing the private lists as the NHS lists. So there would still be the same capacity in the system…

  3. Welcome to the Irish Healthcare System. Once you start on this crack politically, it’s impossible to get off it, irrespective of your background politics. The reason is entirely political and based on a penny rich / pound poor economics. As a politician you know that pouring money into publicly funded hospitals to improve capacity and make inroads into waiting lists takes too long compared to the political cycle. Instead you use “extra capacity” within a private healthcare system to “slash waiting lists”. You create metrics around this for when election time comes around…. “We put X million into slashing waiting lists as compared to the last government who only put X- 10%, and over y thousands of patients have benefited”. You do this as does any government of any hue and over time, your private healthcare industry now becomes dependent on it. It’s penny rich because you aren’t responsible for creating capital infrastructure for hospital expansions, you aren’t required to pay pensions on any new staff in a private hospital and so even though per patient episode (which never takes into account the former long term costings) it’s cheaper, in the long run it’s not, unless and this is the zinger, you actually invest in the public system. What also happens is the private industry cherry picks fitter and younger patients and non complex case mix and leaves the more complicated work to the public system. Then the private system doesn’t have to concern itself with ICU beds and other intensive costly treatments and keeps churning over the quick margins ad infinitum.

  4. problem reaction solution.

    i find it interesting that in the last 4 months every job i have looked at has had included health insurance providing access to a private gp. so long as you have never developed any long term health conditions between jobs as those wont be covered.

  5. Sure thing we use private and all of a sudden a new national private healthcare provider will pop up and the NHS will slowly be shut down.

    Don’t think so it’s bad enough going private for dentistry work I sure as fuck wouldn’t be able to afford both.

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