Healy-Rae and the health service

Snickers Man

The bould Michael Healy-Rae is in the news again for asking 115 questions in a week in the Dail, most if not all of them about individual constituents' hospital appointments.

All have been answered with a standard boilerplate about the minister "not being able to intervene in specific cases".

Healy-Rae maintains that he is only doing his job; critics say that he is grandstanding and wasting Dail time and civil service money asking spurious questions, the answers to which he already knows and the remedies to which are not supposed to be any of his business.

When asked was he trying to move constituents "up the queue" he denied this but insisted that his intervention does good as it "highlights their cases."

Here's a controversial question: does this provide an argument AGAINST having a publicly funded health service at all?

If you have private health insurance, or enough cash to pay for private treatment on an ad hoc basis, you can get what you need when you need it. You pays your piper (or dentist, or oncologist, or physiotherapist or whatever) and you calls your tune.

In a public system: you wait in line until the available resources are allocated to you. Who gets to decide when and where you will be treated? The doctors? Hospital administrators? Or the local TD?

Despite the fact that it is ILLEGAL, as Deputy Healy-Rae was told in the standard responses (and as he no doubt knows damn well already) for the minister to "provide a treatment or a personal service to any individual or to confer eligibility on any individual" there is clearly a belief that a word in the right ear from the right politician might be able to expedite things in individual matters.

There is a word for this. It's "Corruption". And to counter it requires a massive regulatory infrastructure to ensure that resources are being allocated fairly and most appropriately. This, inevitably, introduces red-tape, bureaucratic delays and frustrations for people. It also requires large numbers of people to be paid to work this infrastructure, incurring costs that would be much better and more usefully spent on "Front-line services".

So what should we do? If politicians are sticking their oar in to something that should not be their concern would it not be better to take the whole ball away from them and say to people: "Your health is your own affair. It's not the job of the tax payer to foot the bill a) for your treatment and b) for the salary of some yahoo to interfere in an equitable delivery of that treatment. So pay for it yourself, through your own insurance."

Or alternatively, could there be some sanction against politicians who try to wield their influence in an unethical and corrupt manner?

I know which I'd prefer. But "De people of Kerry" aren't going to do anything to slap down the Healy-Raes, are they?

Harry Palmr

The only argument prompted by this story is that it's the Healy-Reas who should be privatised.

It provides a case against having County Councillors in the Dáil.

micosoft

It provides a case for Kexit.

Owryan

Plenty of others have done this. One td from my constituency asked the then minister for health about a delay in one person getting their glasses.

It's down to parish pump politics, plenty of threads on boards where the answer to questions re entitlements is "contact your td"

LeinsterDub

Someone on newstalk claimed these questions would cost 20k to be answered

Harry Palmr

LeinsterDub wrote: »

Someone on news talk claimed these questions would cost 20k to be answered

€200 a pop x 115 = 23000