Madam, - Yesterday (July 31st) you published two letters on Mary Harney and health planning. I feel that the Minister should be defended from her more unreasonable critics.
First, David Begg writes about the Minister's "ideologically-driven model of private healthcare".
I am sick of those on the left who bang on about others being motivated by ideology, when they themselves have been driven by some form of socialist ideology for decades. Does David Begg not realise that public hospital resources will be restored to their intended use - the treatment of public patients - by the construction of new private facilities for those who wish to use them? If David Begg has more reasoned arguments to make, let him make them, but for heaven's sake spare us the ideology bit.
Prof Gerard Bury states that the Government intends "to find a legislative mechanism to reintroduce community rating". Community rating does not need to be reintroduced: it is still there.
The Supreme Court abolished risk-equalisation payments, not community rating. It is frightening that a professor of medicine does not seem to know the difference.
Many of Prof Bury's other remarks are equally misleading and are in places outrageous, for example the assertion that the private healthcare industry cherry-picks profitable interventions.
As far as I am aware, all of our health insurers cover all cases where serious illness has been diagnosed, requiring hospital treatment. What do your correspondents have against private medicine? Do they understand that in many healthcare systems (on this side of the Atlantic and not just in the wicked USA ), there is widespread private provision, often publicly financed? Do they understand the distinction between private finance and private provision? Or are they just blinded by ideology? - Yours, etc,
JOHN SHEEHAN, Willbrook Lawn, Dublin 14.