Sir, – Conor Pope's report that Laya and Glohealth are to increase their prices by up to 14 per cent will make baleful reading for many families ("Laya, and GloHealth to increase price of health insurance", April 7th).
Their model of insuring secondary care only is outmoded and ultimately unaffordable. It was thought that competition would moderate prices when the market was opened up but instead it has led to the marketing myriad policies that are difficult to understand.
The current state of healthcare funding leaves the burden on the State and has led to a market that is stultified and is currently unfit for innovation.
The experience in the United States over five years of Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act has shown that innovation in the insurance market has led to an average annual healthcare inflation of 3.7 per cent. It has led to biotechnology and digital innovations that have opened up telemedicine and remote health monitoring. It has led to a change in focus from institutional care to care in the community and has even resulted in doctors making house calls again. US healthcare costs are falling as a result.
The US has not had the years of tradition of family medicine we have had here to build on. When its healthcare spending became unaffordable, it essentially copied European models of primary medical care and made it work.
I can only hope our insurers are instructed by an incoming government to provide primary care packages and told to stop marketing more and more unaffordable care that merely responds to high-tech medical inflation.
Left to their own devices, our health insurers will just give us more of the same price rises marketed as better healthcare. – Yours, etc,
TOM O’DOWD, MD
Professor of
General Practice,
Trinity College Dublin,
Dublin 2.