Wishing you good health
Grandad January 6th, 2011
Whatever else you do, don’t fall ill or have an accident in Ireland.
If you are misfortunate enough to require hospital treatment, you are fucked. Mad Cow Harney has managed to reduce the health service here to a point where you would prefer treatment in Uganda or Libya. In fact you would wish you were anywhere else other than Ireland.
Yesterday there were 569 people waiting for beds and having to make do with lying on trolleys in hospital corridors. What the fuck are our billions being spent on in the health service? Far from being reformed, the service still manages to hit new lows in performance. At this rate it has to be the sickest health service in Europe.
Relying on the HSE is like playing Russian Roulette. The only way to ensure proper treatment in a proper hospital is to go privately, and this of course means health insurance. We are informed today that at the end of the month we are going to have to pay more.
Ireland has been in recession for two years now. There has been a long period of deflation, with both prices and wages decreasing. In theory, all salaries and prices should decrease at the same rate, so the overall effect is that no one is worse off. So health insurance should decrease also? Wrong. It is increasing. Bearing in mind that prices generally are going down, by how much do you thing the insurance is rising? 5%? Nah! 10%? No way. 20%? Hahaha! Premiums are going up in my case by a staggering 45%! How can anyone justify a price increase of 45% in the middle of a recession? Fucking madness.
There are times when I feel that I am living through a nightmare. Such crass incompetence, waste and crass mismanagement couldn’t possibly exist in the real world.
But it does.
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