Our So-Called Health System

[radegund]

TheJournal.ie had a piece yesterday about Amnesty's ad campaign for an equal health system in Ireland.

(Incidentally, for me, this comment on that article sums up exactly why a one-tier, free-at-point-of-access health system is really the only defensible approach: "...as soon as rich people have to avail of the same services as the rest of us you’

Comments

[redshira]

I signed, and left a long rant about how if my husband with Marfan Syndrome hadn't been rich, he could well be dead now, because an *urgent* referral for an echocardiogram was answered with a letter saying the wait was two years. It surely goes without saying that if a doctor thinks you need your heart & aorta looked at, you can't afford to wait two bloody years for it. I don't even want to think about the number of dead Marfs who'd be alive if they'd been rich enough, as we thankfully were, to get it done privately within a week. I moved to Ireland from England in 2008, and although I'm extremely grateful that a) we can afford insurance b) we're not in America, I'm not exactly overjoyed to have become familiar with things like having to choose between fixing the car or going to the doctor. And we're rich people with no children; the stress must be horrific for people with more average incomes and/or who have kids.

[radegund]

I know. It's so utterly wrong, the way we have it set up at the moment. There is no defence.