Let's fully privatize health care and abolish HSE

You are forgetting about the 10' of thousands of pen pushers who wouldn't have a job. These people vote, so politicians will never go for a plan like that.

Er, no

this, why does the op think is so inefficient. wait till the regional boards come in yet another layer of management with no structural changes.

Erm, why would it happen? When you are literally holding the keys to life or death, you can charge whatever you want, so we are not talking about making healthcare better and more affordable.

The "efficiency" in private healthcare can achieved by ensuring that people get and stay chronically ill, so that you can extract constant, predictable revenue from them. Old people who are too sick must pay all their life savings to a health provider and then die as soon as they have no more money left. That's efficiency.

What HSE needs is a feedback mechanism -- something that rewards HSE for keeping people healthy and if someone gets sick, they are treated and get better as soon as possible.

I was wondering how long it would take before someone piped up with this stupidity.

The US pay more per person for healthcare than we do. As in their health service is better funded than ours.

Abolishing the HSE would mean that my tax could stay in my pocket and when I need treatment I simply buy it ANYWHERE. Like I am forced to do now, except now I have to save to do so.

Out of all the medical issues I have ever had, all the HSE would do is put me on a list and get back to me years after I was already sorted, only to tell me they may have an appointment.

The problem the US has is less about healthcare or hospitals and more about the regulation of the insurance industry as a whole.

The Irish HSE is staffed to the brim with lifers in non patient facing roles, and work practices that are set by unions so that most of the nurses dont have to actually spend much time nursing and instead are desk bound. Go ask any Irish nurse how long they spend filling out forms every day, and then ask them if their union would allow software to do it.

**** LOL. Public sector healthcare hasnt given me a damn thing since I had my tonsils out, everything else I needed I had to pay for out of my pocket. How is never ever ever receiving treatment, versus paying money and receiving it the next day a worse outcome???

The HSE calling my injuries "elective surgery" and then classifying me as bottom of the list is the biggest slap in the face I faced as a taxpaying citizen yet. I worked in construction and stretched & torn tendons and ligaments in my leg (injury sustained not in work), meant I was going to have to go on the dole as I simply could not do my job.

And unlike those in the HSE, I cannot get paid unlimited sick pay with other peoples taxes.

Much of the provision of h/c across the EU is left to the market, but people have compulsory insurance.

Taking DE and FR, everybody has health insurance, but the there is a mix of providers.

I think it's a reasonable idea to harness the efficiency of the private sector, but combine that with 100% access.

You can say this about most industries, thats why we need regulated capitalism. Irish govts were big into "light-touch regulation" for the financial sector pre 2008 for instance.

Much healthcare on the continent is provided by non-State providers, like churches/charities/for-profits, and it seems to work okay?

Something people may not be aware of is that a lot of private clinics and private hospitals outsource their testing to public hospitals (which charge a fee for this service). In addition private hospitals often treat straightforward cases but will transfer the difficult ones which require intensive care or more specialised care to public hospitals, which have greater experience and hospital capacity to handle these patients.

Privatising public hospitals will do nothing to solve the real problems within the health service. The main ones are a lack of step down units particularly for elderly patients, lack rapid care clinics for minor injuries which cannot be treated by GPs but clog A&Es, a lack of transparency in waiting lists for individual hospitals resulting in patient delays for assessment, the lack of information sharing between hospitals resulting in duplicate tests being performed in different hospitals for the same patient and delays in information sharing when transferring patients from one hospital to another (say report scans if not on NIMIS, delays on blocks or flow reports/blood tests reports. There is also a massive staffing crisis affecting hospital staff resulting in unavoidable delays.

The government need major infrastructure improvements to reform the health service. They need to institute a single patient ID number like the NHS number people have in the UK that all hospitals will use instead of generating a unique ID in each hospital. They need to create regional step down facilities. They need to create a nationwide reporting system for information sharing between hospitals. They need to examine why there are recruitment issues and try to address them.

why dont you come up with a country where it works so?

Well, the HSE are centrally planned state organisations which derive all their income from central government and have little or no incentive to improve performance. The evidence is largely in terms of the much better performance in terms of lower waiting times in places like France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands. These comparisons have been made on numerous occasions.

I make no apology for the Soviet analogy. Central planning in the USSR and the HSE have been failures, for somewhat similar reasons: largely lack of incentives,

IT WORKS HERE!!!

Private healthcare has been fantastic for me and literally everyone else I work with. I don't know anyone in my office without private health care, because when things go wrong, they cannot wait years to sort it, and we are not getting any younger.

I'd be fucked if I got lung cancer without the public system, of course since that usually happens to smokers, I don't smoke!

This kind of thing is why what we really need is ringfencing of taxes. You buy smokes -> tax collected goes towards cancer care. Instead that doesn't happen, it all just goes into one big pot.

Yep, private sector is responsible for delivering returns to the shareholder by whatever means, mostly legal. Patient care, responsibility to the community, etc. etc. go out the window.

After the fiasco of Eircom privatisation, there will never be another big privatisation here anyway.

That may be true when comparing the UK with mainland EU, For Ireland the expenditure numbers (per head of population) are closer to EU. However as Ireland has a relatively young polulation, you would expect them to be a bit lower.

Private health care has other strangeness and differences too ...

The emergency clinics are only open business hours. So don't have an emergency after 6 or at the weekend. And if they can't treat you there you get sent to public a&e.

They can pick and choose what services they provide, what conditions they treat and who they provide then too.

For conditions that don't require hospital stay, you still have to pay 50% of the cost.

Someone who has never spent a penny on private health in this country can join a company with private health care and can have all waiting periods waived.

If you have a heart problem then they seem to go all out on paying surgery, treatments, hospital stays etc. For other things, not so much.

You need to really read the small print, stuff like Lyme disease related illnesses, covid related etc etc may not be covered.

And as someone has said it leeches off the public health care system.

They have all kinds of little "deals" done with various hospitals. And a lot of horse trading it seems. Also, your milage may vary depending on which provider you choose. It's a minefield.

The EU should at least try to get countries in the EU with screwed up public health care to learn from and copy the best countries in the EU w.r.t public health care.

Now hang on, if we fully abolish the HSE that does not means we can't have state funded health care.

In the same way a if we abolish RTE we could still fund public broadcasting.

The LUAS is paid for publicly but managed by a private company and it works very well. The alternative was ask Irish Rail and that was vetoed by the government because they actually wanted it to work.

Our public sector is a very expensive joke for citizens not employed in it. And the HSE is now a behometh that any Minister for Health cannot control

hahaha, that must be one of the funniest posts ever put out on boards

So your private provider - did you vote with your wallet and stop paying them and take your money off to someone else?

Because you can! No such luck with HSE, I am forced to pay for their largesse.

Yeah its hilarious that half of Irish adults voluntarily pay for private health, as the one they are taxed for is unfit for purpose.