Madam, - Does Pat O'Byrne, CEO of the National Treatment Purchase Fund appreciate the social implications of what he writes (September 5th)? He states, with evident satisfaction, that the NTPF has treated more than 35,000 patients. That means that 35,000 publicly funded procedures have taken place without any public detail of the amount paid to the operator for each procedure. These payments are strictly secret.
The steel door that protects the figures is something known as "commercial sensitivity". The social issues are immensely more important than the price of a gall-bladder operation.
By setting up the National Treatment Purchase Fund Mary Harney has at once conceded that the Government is incapable of providing a first-class public hospital service in Ireland; and at the same time she has accommodated the arrogance of private entrepreneurism in imposing its own strict secrecy requirements on what is a totally publicly funded service.
Furthermore Mary Harney has planned a private medical emporium to be built on each campus of 10 public hospitals. When approaching the campus of these dual facilities, poorer people will be directed to keep to the left towards the Dispensary Hospital for the Sick Poor where they belong; while the rich will, perhaps not altogether wisely, keep rigidly to the right. And if any member of the public will be so presumptuous as to ask how much an operator is being paid for a procedure on a public patient in the glamorous private hospital, he will be invited to mind his own business. The patients in the Dispensary Hospital for the Sick Poor, but not, needless to say, in the private emporium, will thoughtfully provide training fodder for future doctors.
If there is an Opposition in the Dáil, and it is by no means always evident that there is one, it should raise Cain before this vulgar social stratification is allowed to stain Irish society for the next 50 years. - Yours, etc,
Dr CYRIL DALY,
Howth Road,
Killester,
Dublin 5.