The Minister for Health, Leo Varadkar, has admitted that the Government's original plan to introduce universal health insurance (UHI) was ‘too ambitious' and will not proceed in its current format.

His comments coincide with the publication of a report by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), which found that the proposed UHI model would increase overall Irish healthcare expenditure by up to 11% and would lead to considerable additional costs for families.

Mr Varadkar has now stated that the Government will not be pressing ahead with its original plans.

"The research by the ESRI indicates that if we had gone ahead with the model as originally proposed, it would have required that we would impose thousands of euro in terms of premium payments on families or exposed the Exchequer to billions in additional subsidies and that just wasn't affordable during a time of really deep recession," Mr Varadkar commented.

According to the ESRI report, each person would have ended up paying between €1,600 and €2,509 per year depending on what was included, if a simple flat-rate premium was applied to all members of the population. The cost to the Exchequer meanwhile would have been between €666 million and just over €2 billion depending on what was covered.

However, Mr Varadkar insisted that the Government remains ‘committed to effective universal healthcare, which is defined as access to affordable, effective quality care for everyone in a timely way'.

How this will be funded will require further research and reforms and Mr Varadkar admitted that while a decision on the funding model could be made during the next term of Government, its implementation realistically would not take place until the term after that.

He added that reforms in the past have been rushed, which has led to mistakes, such as at the time of the establishment of the HSE in 2005.