Ministers partly to blame for overcharging, says Travers

A former Forfás official has told the Oireachtas health committee that Government ministers must take some of the blame for the levying of illegal nursing home charges on medical card holders.

The practice continued from 1976 until late last year, when it was halted by the Government after the Attorney General warned it was legally unsound.

Senior civil servant John Travers was subsequently commissioned to compile a report on how the illegal charges were allowed to continue for so long.

That report primarily blamed officials with the Department of Health, but said successive government ministers should also have asked more questions.

Speaking before the Oireachtas health committee today, Mr Travers said: "I felt that the failure was greater on the part of the administrators than it was on the part of politicians, [but] I didn't exclude the politicians from responsibility in relation to those matters.

"I said that I felt that the politicians over the years, including the present ministers, needed to have probed the thing far more deeply than they did and that wasn't done."