Health spending and insatiable demands

Sir, – Martin Wall reports (News, July 2nd) on a paper prepared by the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform comparing Irish health expenditure with that in other countries.

It points out that health spending here was 28 per cent head higher in 2021 than the average in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and concludes that productivity, efficiency and value for money “will increasingly have to become central” to discussions within Government over health funding to ensure sustainability.

Taxpayers might have hoped that this was already the case but I suppose better late than never.

But I don’t think it is reasonable to draw any conclusions from the headline that health spending here is 28 per cent greater than the OECD average. Practically everything is more expensive here and there is no reason why healthcare should be an exception.

‘My friendship with Leonard Cohen was another kind of fraternal relationship’

---

South Africa 27 Ireland 20: How the Irish players rated at Loftus Versfeld

---

Microplastics are in the heart, lungs, penis, breast milk. Can we keep them out of our bodies?

---

Des Lynam: ‘I had a problem with fast women and slow horses but that’s well in the past’

---

What is striking is that 21 per cent of government expenditure goes to our healthcare system.

This is the second-highest in the OECD, which is counter-intuitive given that we have a relatively young population.

The paper points out that the “over-prioritisation” of health expenditure has an associated cost in that it constrains funding for equally valuable State services such as social welfare and education.

I wonder if the authors of the paper have been reading Anatole Kaletsky who in 2010 wrote in Capitalism 4.0: “The dark, almost unmentionable, secret that will haunt British politics is that the National Health Service has become an incubus, sucking the life out of all other public services which have to be starved of funds to meet the insatiable demands of the NHS.” – Yours, etc,

PAT O’BRIEN,

Rathmines,

Dublin 6.