Sir, – In the past few weeks I have come across ads for private healthcare on local radio, on national radio, in the cinema, on billboards in Cork and Dublin, and on social media.
It is not totally clear what is driving this onslaught of advertising. Whether it is business as usual, fear – due to the slight decrease in the number of people with private health insurance because of its skyrocketing prices – or, possibly, the opportunity for profit that arises when over a million people are waiting on public lists for medical care.
There are also more subtle forms of advertising that the private healthcare companies engage in. In the advertising that they do to the public sector, for example, these include sponsoring screening, information and wellbeing events, as well as sponsoring various fitness activities.
Private healthcare advertisements can normalise the current two-tier health system. They can suppress awareness that there is another alternative entirely to the two-tier system, namely universal healthcare.
Achieving universal healthcare is Irish state policy; the HSE is quite clear that in Ireland “we’re building towards equal access to health services for every citizen. This will be based on individual patient need and not individual’s ability to pay”.
Private healthcare advertisements tend not to directly address what is really at stake with private healthcare: that you might get to live because you have money. Now, this is Ireland, and we all know this, but at the same time, private healthcare advertisements generally – with some exceptions – do not mention money or price.
Given that Sláintecare is HSE, and therefore State, policy, it does not make sense that private healthcare should be allowed to advertise, either directly or indirectly, in or to public sector organisations.
Additionally, all advertisements for private healthcare should be required, where applicable, to contain a clear disclaimer about their average price to enable the public to meaningfully assess what is being presented to them.
Private healthcare ads should also be required to identify where the care that they are offering is available through the public system for free at the point of need.
To be honest, the main issue here relates to the State’s failure to advertise universal healthcare and Sláintecare as a counterweight to the advertising of the private healthcare companies.
Sláintecare is not a bureaucratic process. It rests on population consent and support, which rests on mass awareness. A lot of people have simply never even heard of it.
They have certainly, however, heard from private healthcare. – Yours, etc,
DR MYLES BALFE,
Senior lecturer in medical sociology,
Department of Sociology,
UCC