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WE DEMAND CAR-OWNERS get their vehicle checked out every few years – why not bring in a similar regular check-up for people?
That’s the proposition from Fine-Gael-turned-independent TD Denis Naughten, who’s running for reelection in the Roscommon-Galway constituency.
“Introducing a free national health check for every citizen, every four years, with more frequent tests for high risk categories will catch illness earlier and save lives as well as money,” Naughten said in a statement.
Do you support his proposal?
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I’d just prefer to be serviced regularly
It’s great when you get a good service ..
I dunno this is all getting a bit Big Brother for me! Will there be penalties if you don’t?
You will pay €50 for a retest. Reasons for failing will include a hangover, itchy bollox, yellow teeth, flatulence and hair growing out of your nose. As usual your spare tyre will be checked and your undercarriage will be looked at by a well qualified bloke just off the plane from Poland.
Medical consultants, doctors and GPs will do that for free. My ballocks they will. They are the reason the health system doesn’t work They like money lots of money.
Real men don’t go for check ups. If you have a heart attack, take the pain until it passes. If you get hit by a car, dust yourself down and check to see if the driver is ok. If you get bitten by a venomous snake, drill a hole in the affected area and pour the poison out before it spreads any further. If you get attacked by a vicious dog, bite back, play them at their own game. Don’t be pussyfooting about with doctors, be a tough guy like me.
Damn straight there will be and a hefty fine!
I suppose in theory it sounds good. But how about they fix the fcuk up of a mess there is now.
GPs get paid an average of €9/month for medical card patients, irrespective of how many visits. They have 90% of the contacts with public health patients. That hardly seems like lots of money, does it? I heard recently about a hospital dept in a general hospital which has 9 receptionists. 9! All working together! Apparently the really do get very busy because stuff often gets lost or has to be redone. This is a better target for saving money in healthcare – put in proper systems so the ratio of admin to medics can be slashed.
Please, NOT itchy bollox and hair growing out of your nose. Have these pups no respect for the elderly? (and dat’s only de wimmin)!!
You will be man handled if you do not comply
John Kinsella, doctors atudy for 10-15 years before they earn decent money….do you think that people who commit such a huge portion of their lives to studying shouldn’t be handsomely reimbursed? How much do you think parents spend educating a doctor? And if all they earn at the end of it is 50-60k a year, why would they bother putting themselves through it?
Yeah, death
@John S. We would all love to have the money to put our kids through medical college but unfortunately the world is run by people like you who think the rich should stay rich and the poor shut shut up and like it.
Have to agree with you john,the amount of doctors that signed up to the free health care for under 6s is disgraceful
Look up how some g.ps earn between 250000 and 400000 on medical cards alone not to mention their private practice one Dr. Practices and I say some Dr.s
Yes you could die
Figures for GMS earnings are per practice, not per doctor. So if you’ve 5 doctors seeing GMS patients then that has to cover their wages as well as admin, overheads, etc. Again – it works as €9 per patient per month, no matter how many visits they make. With people living longer, there are more people living with illness that needs to be closely managed. How many times do you think most of those people visit the doctor every month? How many 10-minute blocks of your time would you sell for €9? There are doctors in their 40s, partners in busy practices, who can’t afford to contribute to a pension for themselves and, being self-employed, have nobody else to do it for them. The figures I read today about the ages of GPs should be a wake-up call. As more doctors retire, queues will get longer until the whole system crumbles. Ever wonder why the govt doesn’t just hire GPs as primary carers instead of using medical cards? It’s not because they wouldn’t be busy – it’s because they’re getting them so cheaply now.
@john kinsella: what would you want if you aced your LC, and then trained for another 11 to 16 years. Then there’s the life long learning and updates, oh and of course all the sick & dying people you will help over your career. Any ideas?
@John Michael I am not a doctor, nor am I a rich kid. But I know plenty of them, including 1 from the flats in Ballymun who studied in UCD. If you want something enough you can get there, if you want a life of excuses, then you can always find them
I need the undercarriage serviced.
How about an NCT for the roads and another one for the hospitals where bed space has been drastically cut
The wife had a pain in her stomach on Friday evening and I sadly said to her in a half joking way “you may live with it, because nobody will do anything for you over the weekend in a hospital”! We based this on the fact that she had a bad kidney stone last year and was silly enough to have it on a Friday of a bank holiday weekend. The consultant who saw her after 14/15 hours on a trolley said “well, it’s after 4, so the urology department have clocked out and won’t be back until Tuesday, so we won’t operate”! She was told 2 weeks later they should have removed it straight away. NCT for the hospitals is indeed badly needed!
We should have an NCT for politicians every four years. Oh hang on..
Insurance companies will have a field day with that craic
The car NCT isn’t worth the paper its printed on. Perfectly roadworthy and safe older cars which pass the NCT are now practically uninsurable. Will it be the same with people??
One of my first question to canvassers is to ask if they support yearly NCT testing for older vehicles. Such a scam!
NCT should be done away with ASAP and a proper test introduced covering lights, tyres, glass, brakes, seatbelts and mirrors. Failing cars for numberplates and imaginary structural defects is a scam, pure and simple. Furthermore, cars that fail due to bald tyres or very faulty brakes should not be allowed to leave the test centre.
It was probably a health insurance actuary that suggested it. Slimeballs. Its about time someone took the insurance companies by the balls and choked them.
It’s a joke. 17 year old Avensis..perfect condition..low mileage…passed NCT…insurance went from €330 to €1650 for no other reason than the age of the car. Shopped around and 33 companies would not even quote. Car eventually insured for €850. Immoral and extirtionate behaviour on the part of the insurance companies. Most are pulling this stunt for cars 15 years and over but two companies are not taking on cars older than 10 years.
The insurance companies are in cahoots with the motor industry. Its as clear as crystal..why the regulation institutions are not involved by now is a mystery. This is collusion of the highest degree.
I feel a strongly worded letter coming on
The car insurance in this country needs to be sorted out immediately. In most of Europe you insure the car not the driver! It is purely set up to serve the industry rather than the people here.
My insurance went up 55% this year from 380 to 595 for no reason other than insurance in general has gone up. Tried to get a quote for my 2003 Nissan Almera and half of the companies wont even quote me because the car is too old. Whats the point of the NCT so if insurance companies dont recognise it??!!
As a consumer it feels like the whole insurance industry is colluding with each other to increase prices.
Sounds like a good idea. Only thing is that in studies undertaken abroad, targeting at-risk groups rather than blanket health screening the population has proven a better use of resources.
This nanny state is going mad, I’m moving to n Korea
Pack factor 5000 sunscreen.
Preventative medicine a common sense idea which of course automatically disqualifies it! Right Leo?
All Leo has to say is “Remember that I’m gay, the pain I had to go though blah blah…” And then people would go like “Ahh… good for him. Wait, what were we talking about?”
Can’t see how his sexuality has anything to do with his role as Minister for Health. At the very least the doctor is qualified in his portfolio unlike the majority of the cabinet!
More of this please
The tripe these guys spout. It’s not like he had to go far to see if this idea had been though of before and proven ineffective. But sure it’s only somebody else’s money he is imagining himself spend. Don’t let science get in your way there now.
Our Emergency Depts are chronically over loaded, no nursing home accomodation for the elderly, our social workers are desperatly short staffed and their vulnerable clients are going unsupervised, our ambulance service is under resourced all through lack of funding and this politician has decided to overload the creaking HSE with a vague promise of electoral freebie health screening in a desprate effort to buy his re election. I sincerely hope the electorate can see through this effort to buy votes.
Jes, Denis Naughten is a rarity in the Dail, a TD who actually works for his people, unlike the turncoat traitor FG TD Feighan who knows he hasnt a hope so is standing down! Vote for Naughten!.
Don’t you see though, that this kind of preventative medicine would be a step towards reducing over crowding, bed shortages and waiting lists in the future. Treating and curing patients before their illness becomes chronic reduces the number of beds and surgeries needed in a hospital, therefore reducing the burden on the healthcare system. If only more of our politicians and policy makers had the foresight to put forward proposals like this!
Naughten is an older baldy fella, who is that in the photo?
I failed my emissions test
Got a free health test about 12 years ago. I thought I was doing ok but the nurse found a few things wrong with me. I got them sorted. It made a huge impact in terms of my standard of living. I wasn’t feeling 100% for a few years but I was ignoring it. I’ve heard though that these tests can over look a lot of things and the results often aren’t meaningful so maybe I just got lucky.
I think that’s a great idea. Surely couldn’t cost that much either.
Just be careful of too many false positives. If you look at the the statistics of false positives, it can be a massive problem in causing inappropriate medical treatment.
Wonder would you have to go back for a retest??
I wish we’d scrap the NCT and bring this in instead. The NCT doesn’t save lives. It’s a nanny state money racket.
NCT was an European idea
Sounds great in theory, but the entire health service is badly in need to be fixed first.
it would turn into another revenue exercise for the gov and would lose the actual point of doing it. a bit like the nct
We have one for Politicians, every five years and they still manage to crash our economy every time.
They are moving this direction in the UK for your 50th birthday you get a bowel screening kit, then every 2 years
Ild b fkd. I’m 33 with 3 lower discs gone. I’ll cost the state 80k+ by the time I get back to work thanks to our great health system
How about a NCT for Doctors who haven’t a clue what they are doing without being able to google it and then using Wikipedia…
Aye some of them don’t know their arse from their elbow.
If its going to be free then I support it.
Nothing is free – people seriously need to stop expecting things for free. This will have to be paid for – be it with increase in USC, PAYE, VAT – there be some form of tax created to pay for it.
ONE WAY TO PUT PEOPLE ON TABLETS, IF THERE CHLOLESTEROL IS TOO HIGH PUT THEM ON STATINS, IF ITS THEIR BLOOD PRESSURE THEN STATINS…
They end up putting you on one tablet or another…
If he knocked on my door you couldn’t get me off his face. Roide. All TDs in my area look like they should be hanging off side of a church.
Jesus if he knocked on my door you couldn’t get me off his face. Roide
But what happens if you fail the nct. Do you get prosecuted.
Would you ever ask me arse, you fool. This is aimed at the ‘person ‘ making this revolutionary suggestion, not the Journal author.
That would be great as long as they give financial support to those in society who struggle with expenses
Knowing some of the doctors, many things will be missed as will it adding stress to the HSE…
We need just one thing, go back to the way of our grand parents,
They had No bottled water, No Gyms, No Excess, They had a balanced life style. If we follow this with the facts we know about cigarettes, drink, fat, sugar, etc…. we can be fit & healthy.
I’ll leave a €50 in my glove compartment
Heard this been discussed on Andrew Marr show last week. Where screening would have saved a life. “Sir David Frost’s 31-year-old son died from genetic heart condition spotted during his father’s autopsy after doctors failed to warn the family about it”. ~
Ment N CT
Who paid you to publish this shite. Gutter journalism at its very worst. FFS.
I`m working over in Japan and I have to go for a full medical check up every year. By law it`s the emloyers responsibility to ensure all employees do this, also they pay for it and it`s done during work hours so employees don`t lose out. If employees want to they can opt for extra checks and pay the difference, many older eployees go for these.
Initially I thought this was over the top but it catches small problems before they become big ones. Also when I get the report I compare it to the one from previous years, I notice what`s up and what`s down so it`s easy to catch a trend. This way I think patients are more active participants in their health which is a good thing when obesity rates are starting to sky rocket.
Great idea and I hope something like this is introduced but when it comes from someone going for re-election I`ll believe it when I see it.
Is that no s free primary care check???
Car not just another bl,,dy tax
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