‘Endangering lives for the sake of a few euro’

These are the words of Regina Hennelly, a 29-year-old dialysis patient on the kidney transplant waiting list, who has been forced to live without a medical card for almost six months due to HSE bureaucracy.

At the start of August, Regina, a journalist from Rathfarnham in Dublin, applied for her medical card to be renewed as its standard three-year period had run out.

As her working circumstances — she earns just under the average industrial wage — stayed the same and her condition had deteriorated since her initial medical card application, she justifiably presumed the issue would be a simple rubber-stamping matter.

However, due to what doctors and patients insist is a cruel, penny-pinching measure — a claim the HSE deny — her application has been significantly delayed.

Worse still, officials at the HSE’s centralised medical card centre in Finglas, Dublin, have told Regina that by November, her application had yet to even be opened.

As a result, the dialysis patient has to pay €120 a month for medication out of her own pocket, avoid visiting a GP because she cannot afford the cost, and is in constant fear of the damage being done to her health by administrators supposedly there to ensure her recovery.

“I re-applied, I sent the relevant documents, the rent details, the stamp from the doctor, everything. I made the phone calls, but basically the application’s just been left there. Nobody has got back at all.

“You spend 10 minutes on hold and the usual nonsense, then they tell you to keep checking because the onus is on you,” she told the Irish Examiner.

Like other patients and their doctors facing similar situations across the country, Regina is adamant people renewing their medical cards are being specifically targeted for delays because the cost of the state helping them is more obvious than new applicants.

Last night, Regina’s deteriorating condition meant her peritoneal dialysis treatment was increased from eight hours a day to 10.

Due to the impact of her chronic kidney problems, she believes the HSE delays are putting her already problematic health at risk — and for little to no benefit to the state.

“What they are doing is completely worthless. They are endangering people’s lives for the sake of a few euro,” she said.

* A longer interview with Regina from yesterday’s Breakfast Show on Newstalk, which is co-presented by Irish Examiner columnist Ivan Yeates, can be heard at: http://www.newstalk.ie /programmes/all/breakfast/podcasts/