A Fair, Efficient Healthcare System is Within Our Reach

IT SEEMS likely the next government will be made up of Fine Gael and Labour. Both propose extensive changes to the health service and both propose to introduce universal health insurance.

Last weekend, Fine Gael published a detailed policy proposing to introduce a social health insurance scheme, modelled roughly on the system in the Netherlands. Labour has yet to publish its detailed policies.

[...]Can we really implement a social health insurance system in Ireland? A group of national and international experts, clinicians, managers, policy makers and others met in Dublin just before Christmas to consider this question. Some basic principles of care delivery were brought out at the conference.