Health debate: The State should start withdrawing from providing health services and instead seek "market-oriented solutions" to improve services to patients, the Fine Gael health spokeswoman, Ms Olivia Mitchell, told the party conference.
Speaking at the end of a debate on health, Ms Mitchell also said the protests about Ennis and Nenagh hospitals could not be ignored. The Hanly report was not "an immutable holy grail", and people feared they would get the cost-saving measures in the report but not the promised enhanced services.
She said that the introduction of competition would "capture for patients the benefits of the market and ensure that the health services benefits from innovation, from financial and operational efficiencies, the use of technologies the incentives to control costs and all of the other dynamic benefits that operate automatically in a system in which competition flourishes."
She said the State should not withdraw overnight from providing health care, "but I think it is a direction in which the health service must begin to move". The present system contained no incentives to provide value for money, innovation or a response to the changing demands of the population.
In relation to the Hanly report she said the public did not expect "brain surgery in every hospital". But what they did want was some form of medical cover on a 24-hour basis.