In that case why not have the same car / house / holiday insurance for everyone. No other area of insurance works like that why should health be different?
It seems to me the government is trying to shoehorn silly solutions to an already broken system instead of just fixing it. Private health insurance is not the answer; it should only be an addition to a high standard of public cover which everyone should be entitled to.
Because health is different.
You don't need a car, or a holiday, (or at least one could make the argument that you could live without either), however, you certainly at some stage will need access to health care system.
I suspect the reason that people feel forced to purchase private insurance is because they do not trust the public health care system here any longer.
However, your point re private health insurance being in addition to a high standard of cover is spot on.
In the UK (NHS) there is availability of private health care, in addition to the NHS.
It is also un-tenably expensive (£250 (yes, pounds) for a 20 minute standard consultation in a BUPA hospital, paid by yours truly, for example)
The private health care system there is over priced, and to my mind (and from personal experience) no where near as good as public health care.
In addition, there are many concerns there about the 'privatisation' of the NHS, and the negative impact that this will have on the more vulnerable members of society (more cost effective for a private hospital to take an orthopaedic contract on that involves doing knee ops on healthy young people following skiing accidents as opposed to taking contracts that involve admitting a poorly elderly person that just broke their hip, that also has lots of other medical issues also going on , that will lead to a longer stay, and more cost to treat.)
It also leads to de-skilling of doctors, and difficulty in training doctors in the future (if you are paying to go privately, would you object if you were seen by a supervised juniour doctor? I think many might).
You can extrapolate similar problems to here, without the back-up of a relatively efficient NHS behind it (relative to Irish Health care provision, that is)
Improving the public health care system would make much more sense than bolstering up the private health care system (hence my preference for socialised medical care).
Surely that would be tantamount to the government admitting that the public health service is a failure - political suicide?
But it is a failure.