State ‘stripping sick of medical cards to fund under-6 care’

Doctors have accused the Government of stripping sick, elderly and disabled patients of medical cards to fund its ambitious plan to extend free GP care to children under the age of six.

The claims were made at the Irish Medical Organisation’s AGM where doctors queued at a packed meeting of GPs to question Junior Health Minister Alex White about his controversial plan.

Waterford GP Niall Macnamara asked how Mr White could “morally or ethically” justify taking cards “from the sick and the elderly”.

“The idea that some of this is going to be funded through general taxation is a nonsense. This is being funded exclusively through the removal of medical cards from those who need them,” Dr Macnamara said.

To illustrate his point, Dr Macnamara said there were three GPs in his practice, who between them had six children aged under five, all of whom will be recipients of the new medical cards.

“We’re the last people who should be getting medical cards,” he said.

Dr Macnamara said there has been a 7% decline in medical card patients since January. Other GPs cited a 5%-7% drop — backing claims cards are being stripped from other patients.

Galway-based GP Dr Martin Daly asked the minister why they had failed to look after people with long-term illness — the Government’s original plan for free GP care had pegged those with long-term illness as the first beneficiaries of the scheme but this was scrapped due to legal complications.

Dr Daly said the under sixes plan was “nauseating”.

Dr Daly said the minister was “taking resources away from people who are at the margins of income eligibility, the intellectually disabled and the physically disabled” while “prioritising the children of better-off families”.

However, Mr White, who received a cool reception and the occasional jeer, said it was “entirely wrong” to suggest that cards were being removed from some people and given to others.

“To remove medical cards from people who need them and to give them to people who don’t would be the wrong thing to do and we never do that,” he said to a loud jeer.

Mr White said the €37m scheme was being funded by “new money” for primary care and not money “liberated or used from any other part of the system”.

He said he supported a universal system because he believed people were entitled to certain basic services “like health and education” free at point of access, even if they were “relatively wealthy, like most of us in this room”.

The scheme was a move towards getting away from the existing means-tested medical card system.

“The only way we can get away from all this business of probity checks and checks on peoples’ means and repeat checks on peoples’ means every couple of years is to go as quickly as we can and as quickly as we can get agreement to a universal system,” the minister said.

Speaking on RTÉ Radio yesterday, Mr White again called on doctors to discuss their concerns with him at the negotiating table.

He said Ireland will “never have a health system” that works unless reform is embraced, and again insisted medical cards are not being taken from the vulnerable.