The Government's decision to reduce its allocation to a new treatment procurement fund by €15 million proves the National Health Strategy is "going nowhere fast", the lobby group Patient Focus has said.
"To have a health service so stop-start as this is unbelieveable. No other country in the developed world would use its health service as some sort of cushion for an economic downturn," said the group's founder, Dr Tony O'Sullivan.
He was responding to the revelation yesterday that the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) had been scaled back to help the Department of Health reach its cutbacks target sought by the Minister for Finance, Mr McCreevy.
The leader of the Labour Party, Mr Ruairí Quinn, was among those to criticise the move yesterday, describing it as "perhaps the single most hypocritical cut" carried out by the Government since the general election.
However, the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, said the funding decision was not a cutback. Rather, he said, it resulted from the fact that the NTPF had been unable to spend the money.
Echoing the view of many in the health sector, Dr O'Sullivan said the fund, a brainchild of the PDs, was not a great idea in the first place as, he said, it would have been better to invest in core health services instead.
However, he remarked: "There is something shameful in the Government back-pedalling so fast on the health strategy. We don't need cuts just because growth has slowed.
"A survey before the general election showed that 75 per cent of people would prefer to have more investment in the health services rather than cuts in income tax.
"Charlie McCreevy is unfortunately one of the 25 per cent, and only for that we would have a positive approach to strengthening services," said Dr O'Sullivan. "It's quite clear the health strategy is now on hold."
The Taoiseach rejected the claim that he was reneging on pre-election promises. The Government was spending €3.6 billion more on public services this year, including an extra €1 billion on health.
"Our difficulty is that public expenditure for the first half of the year was growing higher than 14 per cent, higher than the €3.6 billion," Mr Ahern said.
"That requires us to make some internal adjustments in line with the commitments that I made on behalf on the Government and my party, and the Tánaiste made on behalf of her party."
The fund, which was allocated an initial €25 million to get private treatment for public patients, was announced last November but not activated until July.
Both Mr Ahern and the Minister for Health, Mr Martin, said during the election campaign that the fund would help eliminate hospital waiting lists within two years.
Describing the cutback as another "monumental deceit", Fine Gael's spokeswoman on health, Ms Olivia Mitchell, said the Government and Mr Martin were "trying to con us into believing that they have been unable to spend all of the original fund, that no more private beds are available in Europe".
