The Government is handing the public health system over to multinational corporations while pursuing a policy of valuing rich people's health more than poor people's, a conference was told at the weekend.
The conference, titled For People or Profit?, which was hosted by the Health Services Action Group, also called for protests against private hospitals.
Allyson Pollock, professor of health policy at the University of Edinburgh and author of a book on privatisation in the British national health system, NHS Plc, said Ireland was very vulnerable to the widespread establishment of "for-profit" hospitals while investment in the public system falls.
In England and Wales "foundation hospitals" were run to make profits and about one third of their budgets went into marketing, advertising and invoicing. These were not accountable to any government body, she said.
"Ireland is very vulnerable to this breaking open of the public system, as there are so many market mechanisms in place already. The fractures are already there. There never has been real equality in healthcare here and huge unfairness is already designed into the system.
"Your Government is introducing public-private partnerships which are mechanisms to bring in large multinational corporations to run hospitals." The US-based Triad International was one example, she said. Triad will run Beacon hospital in Sandyford, south Dublin.
There are 18 private hospitals now operating in the State, built with the assistance of tax breaks introduced in the 2001 Finance Act. The profits can be considerable, as exemplified by the Blackrock Clinic in Dublin, which last year made more than €6 million.
Madeline Spiers, president of the Irish Nurses' Organisation, said private hospitals were only available to those who had money to pay. Also they were selective about the services they offered. They did not offer A&E, she said, or care that entailed a long-term commitment to patients. The most expensive services were left to the public sector.
Journalist Fintan O'Toole described as grotesque the application of the market place to healthcare, particularly given that the need and demand was "vastly greater among the poor than the rich".
"If they [ Government] were actually serious about applying the market place model to healthcare it would have to be slanted towards more quality care for the poor." It was grotesque and absurd, he said, that the for-profit model now being pursued was in fact slanted to provide healthcare to those who could pay for it.
"The idea that you use public resources to give services to people who need it least and impoverish services for those who need it most is appalling."
Those who supported using public money to support for-profit medicine were saying it was public policy that wealthy human lives were worth more than poor lives, he said.
