Give us the facts on health service plan

WHEN the Oireachtas Committee on the Future of Healthcare announced its plans for a new universal health service, an Irish NHS if you like, it was universally reported that the cost of the plan would be €2.8billion over ten years, added to a one-off €3billion investment in infrastructure.

This seemed an incredibly low figure and we were deeply sceptical. If it was effectively to cost just €280million a year, why wasn’t it done sooner? Nothing added up. Now, talking to this newspaper, the chairwoman of the committee, Róisín Shortall, accepts that the total cost of running such a system is, as we suspected, €2.8billion EVERY year. She and the committee had simply assumed that health budgets would rise by 7% a year every year – and that they didn’t need to set out what it would actually cost taxpayers to fund these giant annual increases.

In fact, even finding €2.8bn more for the health budget actually means the State collecting an extra €1,750 a year for every taxpayer in the country. (Or cutting €2.8bn a year from other services, such as pensions, welfare or gardaí, and handing that cash over to the health department instead). But however that money is raised, it has to come from somebody’s pocket or somebody’s budget. It will not simply grow on trees.

It may well be that many people would be happy to pay that price – extra taxes or reduced services elsewhere – for a worldclass health service free at the point of delivery to all; indeed, many pay a great deal more than that already for private health insurance. It is still a discussion worth having, but we can have it only if the facts are explicit.

Moreover, we also need to consider what might happen if we were to endure another recession, and the nation’s tax receipts fell by €10bn? Could we still expect to find all the extra cash this plan requires?

An Irish NHS is a wonderful aspiration, and we should discuss it, but we need to be forthright about the costs. It is incumbent on our TDs to spell out in euros and cents what the total additional costs of such a scheme would be, compared to what the State spends on health today. Only then can our citizens come to a truly informed decision.