So Mary Harney considers it "invalid" to suggest that Breda O'Gorman's case has anything to do with waiting lists. Writing in the letters page of this newspaper last Friday, the Tánaiste takes me to task for the "linking of this case with waiting times for surgical operations".
Breda O'Gorman suffers constant, agonising pain caused by multiple sclerosis. Last November, she underwent a battery of tests and was deemed suitable to have a pump inserted to alleviate her pain. Since then, nothing has happened. Various excuses have been given, many promises made. But so far, nothing.
Breda's pain was so bad this week that on Tuesday, for instance, she had to sit up most of the night just to get some very slight relief. Her upper body is stiffening up, but her pain is too great to allow her to avail of physiotherapy.
Again because of the pain, her movement is limited and she is getting pressure sores which are infected. She fears that they may become gangrenous and that she may lose a leg as a result.
The reality is that Breda is on one of those "phantom" waiting lists that everyone appears so desperate to deny exist at all. Mary Harney tells us that the National Treatment Purchase Fund has done away with waiting lists.
Clearly some other explanation must be found for Breda's plight, which incidentally elicited scant sympathy from the Tánaiste in her curiously cold letter to this paper.
Breda's condition is "medically complex", according to Ms Harney, a fact which is news to Breda herself. As far as Breda is concerned, she has MS, is in pain, and needs a pain pump.
The O'Gorman family were upset that the Minister's office neither contacted them nor sought their permission before she rushed into print to tell us all about Breda's complexities last week.
Even worse, however, was the following self-serving paragraph from the Minister, placed immediately after her outline of Breda's case: "Unfortunately, patients will continue to present with clinical conditions where there are no immediate clinical measures to restore their full health or alleviate pain or symptoms as much as we would all want to."
There is a clear implication here that there is nothing much to be done for Breda and cases like her, even with the best will in the world. In Breda's case, it is palpably untrue - a simple procedure to insert a pain pump could transform, even save, her life. It is profoundly disturbing that a Minister for Health should gallop into print, disseminate details of a patient without her permission, and then imply that there is nothing to be done - all in a self-centred effort to defend herself politically.
Ms Harney's haste to publicly exonerate herself and her department is in sharp contrast to the lack of response to repeated pleas made to her up to five weeks previously.
Labour Party leader Pat Rabbitte first wrote to her on May 25th, explaining the urgency and asking her to intervene. He heard nothing back, and so wrote again on May 29th, enclosing a letter from Breda's husband, Tony, laying out the grim reality of her daily life in graphic terms. He received a bare acknowledgment some days later.
After more urgent faxes, someone from the Department of Health contacted Mr Rabbitte. The matter was being looked into, he was told, and they would get back to him. This kind of thing went on throughout the month of June.
Pat Rabbitte had first come across Breda's case in early April, when Tony came to him begging for help.
The Labour leader made contact at that stage with both the hospital concerned (Cork University Hospital) and the Health Service Executive. He was told that Breda would be operated on within four to six weeks.
Even before that, in early March, Fine Gael TD Jimmy Deenihan (one of the O'Gormans' local representatives in Kerry) had also made representations on Breda's behalf to the hospital and the HSE. He was similarly fobbed off.
All of these approaches to the health authorities for Breda were made privately, out of the public glare.
It was in the knowledge that nothing was happening and that the Dáil was about to go into recess for three months that the O'Gorman family gave permission for Pat Rabbitte to raise the matter publicly.
Breda has now been told that she will be called for the procedure within two weeks. A pain pump has miraculously materialised, apparently, and her operation can go ahead.
However, as she told me during the week, she has heard that so often at this stage that she doesn't really believe it any more.
Her great fear is that if they let it go much longer, they'll be telling her that she's too weak for the surgery. That really will be the end of the line for her.
But at least it will be one name less on the waiting lists that have ceased to exist, because as we should know by now, no one in Ireland has to wait for medical care any more.