Open letter to Mary Harney
Head Rambles Manor
Glendoher
Wicklow
23rd July 2009
Dear Minister,
I am not an actual constituent of yours, but as you are Minister, then technically your constituency is the entire country?
Anyhow, I have a problem.
You see, I have to buy regular medication, otherwise my psychiatrist says she cannot answer for the consequences. The last time I skipped a month, there was the unfortunate incident where the entire car park in Glendalough was blown up for the sake of two bus loads of tourists. If Herself misses out on a month, then the entire village and most of the surrounding county have to take to the bunkers. In other words, our medication is fairly important not only to us, but to South East Ireland and International relations.
I understand that you have to make “difficult decisions” because of these hard times in which we find ourselves, through no fault whatsoever of this government. I also understand that by cutting payments to pharmacists by 30% you will save a few million, however this is forcing them to stop dispensing under the Medical Card and Drugs Refund Schemes. As you have excluded me from the Medical Card Scheme through other savings initiatives, I will therefore be forced to pay for my prescriptions out of my own pocket.
Here is my problem. You see I can buy my drugs over the counter all right, but it will cost me around €1,000 a month [it would be around one third of that but because of one of your other initiatives they aren’t allowed dispense generic drugs] , and that is more than my income. Fortunately, I can get some of my drugs elsewhere. I know you will approve of my going back on heroin [which I can easily obtain in my local town] as it will save you a fortune on Methadone. My friend Billy is not so fortunate, as he can’t afford Lithium on his income and is going to have to suffer and enjoy [depending on the time of day] his Bi-Polar Disorder.
I know that on your income, €1,000 is a paltry amount, so maybe you could see your way to sending me the price of a loaf of bread? Having spent my entire income on drugs, plus what little saving I had left, I would like to be able to eat occasionally?
Yours in hope and starvation,
Grandad
What you need is a healthy dose of Obamacare.
TT – I used to live in dread of what Dubya would come up with next. Nowadays, America is heaven on earth compared to this fucking kip.
Despite its apparent failures/problems, I will never ever slag off the NHS because what we pay in National Insurance, at least it actually goes towards our subsidised prescription costs (£7.50 per item) and we dont have to pay criminal fees to see our GP. What in gods name do you pay PRSI for over there? When I lived there all i got for my contributions was a free eyetest and a dental checkup but had to pay for any work that needed doing. Before i moved to england I paid approx £42 (punts) for one out of three asthma inhalers I needed. That was back when it was punts!!!!! I nearly collapsed in the chemist here the first time i bought it when they asked me for £6 sterling. Add on top of that the fact that Family Planning isnt a dirty word(s) here and young people can get free access to all sexual health screening services and family planning. I cant be sure but there is bound to be a cervical cancer vaccine on offer here too. It makes me fume to see my parents struggle to pay for their prescriptions every month when just a couple of hundred miles away they could be living a very different life. In this day and age is there any real difference why Ireland and England should be so different economically and socially?
Then there are the clowns who make us the laughing stock of the world by worshipping holy tree stumps in limerick. THank god my ‘happy pills’ are only £7 here cos if I lived in ireland again I think I would have topped myself by now. Every day i get closer to taking out british citizenship only the ghosts of my granny and great-aunties haunting me from beyond the grave have stopped me. They’ve only just got used to me marrying an english man 🙂
Becky – The “health” care system here was always a joke, but since that bitch took over, it has collapsed altogether. I paid PRSI all my life but have never been entitled to any optical or dental care. The only way I feel in any way secure about my healthcare is to take out private insurance [which is in the thousands, per annum], as the public service is literally a death sentence. The chemists here are willing and able to provide generic drugs, but the Department has forbidden it. If I want more than 24 Neurophen [for example] I cannot buy them. I have to visit two separate pharmacies!!!! In France, I can buy as much as I want at half the cost.
As for being the laughing stock of the world – please do not laugh at people who worship tree stumps…. today a law was enacted making blasphemy legal, which literally means you could be prosecuted for laughing at the stump worshippers. That is how backward this country has become.
This government has bankrupted us. They have created a “health” service which is quite literally a danger to the health, and now they are introducing medieval laws.
GOD GIVE ME FUCKING STRENGTH!!!!!!!!!
Yesterday I laughed at an elderly nun falling in the street and then I wee’d in the holy water font in westminster cathedral. Come and get me!!!!!
Yes. What are we going to do about it? Anyone? Beuller?
Frustrating thing is that there’s hardly a voice raised: Greens are gelded; Fine Gael are even further to the right; Labour have no power; and the rest never do more than make up the numbers anyway. Fie on them!
Whatever happened to all the money raked in by the Irish Hospital Sweepstakes when it was virtually the only game in town on both sides of the Atlantic. I used to sell tickets here in Canada (illegally, Canada had no Lottery in those days) and couldn’t get my hands on enough of them. I know it’s long gone but was anything in the health services line ever done with that money? Dreaming again I suppose.
Paulo1 – I believe that money was used to cure TB.
Mary Harney has no mandate for the position she holds & only holds the position because no one in Fianna Fail wants the fucking job.
The HSE is so fucked up the only way to fix it is to dismantle it and start again, this time with a 50% reduction in administration and management staff.
Maybe the pharmacists could survive on 30% less, but why should they, they provide a very important and in some cases vital service that saves lives and keeps people out of A&E and hospital wards. The few million you save here is nothing compared to the millions that are wasted weekly in the HSE.
So fuck off Harney you obesity crisis in your own knickers – Bitch.
Lafsword – What pisses me off about Harney is that she has her vision of how the HSE should be run. AT this stage it is patently obvious that her vision is nothing short of a nightmare yet she is allowed carry on hacking the system to pieces. I not only blame her for persisting in a grossly over expensive fatally flawed system, but also those gobshites in FF who allow her. Any government with an iota of sense would have replaced her by now and dumped her in the slurry pit where she belongs.
I fully agree about the pharmacists. One aspect that is constantly overlooked is that they are highly qualified and frequently dispense valuable advice as well as medication. What’s more, in many cases the medication they dispense is literally a lifeline.
What to do, what to do:
Exhume Nye Bevan, clone him and send him in to establish an Irish NHS. Its amazing what an ex-miner can achieve.
Noel Browne didn’t do a bad job here in his time either and with the gelding of the bishops his policies would be very successful today. The difference wass that he cared…and yes Lafsword is right he took the mone from the Sweep people and opened the sanitoriums and cured TB in very short time.
I’m not being funny, but I didn’t know there was a cure for TB. Or do you mean a preventative vacine? Not messing here, I’m genuinely curious.
Like I said. You’re welcome here in Vermont. We got plenty of green mountains, enough rain to make you feel at home and since (I assume) you can qualify as a senior citizen the majority of your medical requirements will be taken care of. Vermonters are an extremely independent, self sufficient (stubborn, thick headed) lot for the most part but we have our share of idiots and tourists to feed your hobbies and habits (we like guns too…lot’s of ’em and we train our young’uns at an early age). Housing? It’s a buyers market baby.
Hope you can deal with 5 to 6 months of cold though. Other than that, the door’s always open.
.-= >> Kirk M´s latest brainfart .. Too Wet to Burn =-.
Sign this and help save Irish pharmacies from her!!!
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/stopmaryharney/index.html