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HEALTH MINISTER LEO Varadkar has been granted a supplementary health budget for 2014 of €680 million — almost €200 more than the figure he had been lobbying for.
Varadkar had been asking for €500 million to fill the hole in his his annual budget.
It’s typical for supplementary budgets for Health to be announced towards the end of the year, and Varadkar said the funding would help account for “increased levels of medical activity, drugs and therapies, medical appliances, the cost of State claims, and frontline staff”.
Of the total supplementary payment, €510m is going on the HSE deficit, while €54 million is required for payments by the HSE to the State Claims Agency.
Additionally, €5 million is being allocated towards drug programmes for high-risk Hepatitis C patients, and €3 million is going towards a new ‘delayed discharge’ scheme for patients.
“The timing of income collection and working capital requirements associated with prior years contributes a further €108 million cash requirement in 2014,” the Department said in a statement.
Fianna Fáil health spokesperson Billy Kelliher said the payment was “the direct result of the fundamentally flawed 2014 health budget”.
“The fallout from last year’s bogus budget has resulted in exorbitant waiting lists, increases in the number of patients on trolleys and long delays across a range of services,” Kelleher said — calling on the Minister to explain what impact the overrun would have on the health budget in 2015.
“The impact of these ill-thought out funding allocations are leading to diminished services across the health sector and will compound the pressure on already stretched resources,” Kelleher added.
Varadkar said the large supplementary budget “allows us to bring forward some spending from 2015 into December of this year”.
“It will have no impact whatsoever on the budget for the Department of Health for next year and the HSE Service Plan announced last week is unaffected and the figures remain unchanged.”
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Nice work Leo.
This time next week you will be the new leader of FG….
Enda Kenny thought he was shafting you when he made you minister for health….
Now he’s the one with the constant headache….
The HSE’s biggest expense is the 102,000 staff that it’s desperately trying to support. In a time of digital diagnostics, e-mail and electronic storage, why do we still need so many staff especially middle managers. Time to cull 12,000 to 15,000 surplus to requirement staff from the HSE.
Well said. None of that was mentioned. Usual PR crap of money for medicine for the poor and brave front line staff. Truth is there is no frontline staff as there are to many admin people doing nothing in hse. Urgent cleanup is needed. Even the trokia were shocked at the waste in it
This is the problem why can’t anybody do something about this ongoing situation of course we all know the answer, votes.
Start with the management layer….
Wow a plug to fix the titanic that is the sinking HSE… That’ll save it
When are we going to realise that the problems in health can’t be fixed by throwing money at it. We need to look at how the money is being spent
where it is being spent hospital by hospital
Absolutely! It’s rife with inefficiencies. But then again that’s nearly every Irish department.
Just in time for all the extra managers to get an ould Christmas bonus …..
Lining up a golden boy to bring a new face to the leadership come election time
It’ll not work
Guess the election campaign has started for real and its still too late. Byeeeeeee.
The budget overruns for health are reaching farcical proportions at this stage. Why is this?
Should have asked for one billion!
Yeah! And let’s raise taxes to pay for it! Woop!
Why don’t we have Ansbacher out in the open and then we might see how much could be gained from an off-shore tax
An extra billion should of been more like it and that still would not solve the disaster that is the HSE, He needs to get all the consultant posts filled as soon as possible and then he needs to take the power away from the consultants that seem to have all the cards up their sleeves ,he needs to stop people dying on a daily basis that wouldn’t happen if the HSE was run properly so excuse me if I don’t do backflips over an extra 200 million that will most likely end up in some consultants pockets and last but not least he needs to stop our highly trained nurses going to work for the NHS. Wake up Leo and co.
Well said.
Another pro Leo -the people’s man-story on the journal. There must be 2 each week now.
His coronation must be imminent at FG headquarters
Fair play Leo
Go and shite will ye
People in Ireland pay for health care, with the exception of a small number of medical card holders, as consumers we should start demanding a better service. It’s disgusting to think of a health service as a commodity but that’s how it’s treated. Today I heard a story of a baby born with half a heart, had a medical card for two years and then it was stopped… Disgusting carry on.
I was in Thailand with a friend- she was ill we brought her to hospital. Cannot exaggerate how excellent her Heath care was. I even was given a bed to sleep in. When we came home the doctor told her that the HSE doesn’t even use the tablets she was on because they are too expensive. Now the healthcare isn’t free in Thailand but it’s a lot cheaper than here. She used her domestic VHI health insurance to cover her in Thailand yet the same policy can’t buy those tablets in Ireland.
Claire over 40 % of the population have medical cards. Most people who don’t have cards or insurance only pay the inpatient charge for first ten days which is a fraction of the real cost.
In Britain – everyone has a medical card – it’s called the N.H.S. – just sayin’ , then again with the Irish Nation carrying the cost of training their nurses for the last 6 years it’s easy for them and harder for us !
When Maggie wanted to move a few travellers from England she started decreasing the dole and at the same time Charlie upped it – When England needed nurses we introduced a recruitment ban and even when it was lifted the jobs were only paying 20,000 sterling – while at the same time we were providing a fortune to agencies to provide nurses here from overseas in jobs that would have no pension etc.
Macroeconomics folks Macroeconomics !
Let me see if I’ve got this right – after giving so much of it away to bond holders, this government is using our money to buy our votes?
Burn the bondholders
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