Maurice Quinlivan
Published: 1 March, 2008
Maurice Quinlivan Limerick City speaking is support of Motion: 161 and against this Government's continued attempts to privatize our health service.
Recently Mary Harney was criticized for attending the Superbowl whilst on a trip to America funded by Irish taxpayers. Personally I had no objection to her attending the Superbowl.
What I do object to is her looking to America for solutions to our health care crisis.
Ireland has nothing to learn from the American health care system save to confirm that we don't want one like it here.
In Mary Harney we have a Minister of Health who believes the US system of healthcare offers "Best Practice". That system leaves 47 million Americans, almost 16% of their population, without access to healthcare of any kind.
This Government continues to engage in nothing less than the systematic privatisation of our healthcare system-hiving off treatment to the private sector at every turn from the National Treatment Purchase Fund to the subsidisation of co-location private hospitals even as wards in our public hospitals have to close due to lack of funding, even as the Accident and Emergency centres continue to buckle beneath ever worsening levels of overcrowding, and patients linger on trolleys for hours on end and in some cases days on end.
Indeed it is little wonder that she is referred to by many staff in the Health service as the Minister for Trolleys.
In my home City of Limerick as she does in 6 other locations throughout this state she presses ahead with the irresponsible and reprehensible co-location policy. This will futher heighten inequality as the best care will be on offer to those with the deepest pockets, while the rest of us will languish on waiting lists.
This is not what we as Republicans believe in. Sinn Féin wants an Ireland that will provide health care to all free at the point of delivery, on the basis of need alone, and funded from general fair and progressive taxation. Health Care is a Right, not a privilege!
To finish it is worth quoting Martin Luther King jnr "of all the forms of inequality, inequalities in health are the most inhumane"
Support motion 161.
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