Medical cards: Staggering political ineptitude

In what is clearly its most remarkable U-turn to date, the Government on Tuesday announced that it would return discretionary medical cards to over 15,000 people who had them removed between July 2011 and May 2014.

That they were taken away in the first place suggests a heartless disregard for those already forced to struggle with the twin evils of grave long-term illness and severe financial constraints.

It also reveals a political ineptitude of staggering proportions and an administration so obsessed with balancing the books that it has lost touch with those who elected them.

The abiding trait of this Coalition Government is denial: for months, it denied any crisis in health, evidenced last October by the Taoiseach’s bombastic description of the medical cards row as “scare-mongering” while insisting that “every person who deserves a card” was getting one. That clearly was not the case then, nor is it now. It has been the same approach, lurching from one mismanaged crisis to another. In each case, the approach has been denial, eventually followed by grudging acceptance and a half-baked solution — in that order.

But it has been the medical cards debacle that has caused the greatest public concern. As many politicians found to their cost during the local and European elections, thousands of citizens not personally affected were appalled that seriously ill people were effectively denied access to basic medical services — all in the name of cutting costs.

The solution offered now is a sticking plaster: the return of cards on a temporary basis until next July and a blunt refusal to refund the medical expenses for the period when they were withdrawn.

Then, there is the further bureaucracy that many will face. Discretionary cards will only be returned to people who during their review provided the documentation required to assess their eligibility — the kind of engagement with authorities for which you would need to be in the whole of your health to manage. As well as that, the HSE has said it will take at least three weeks before some discretionary medical card holders will hear from it about cards being restored to them. In the meantime, they must keep paying medical bills that will not be refunded.

It is a sad reality that a number of those will not live to see that day. Those affected by the withdrawal of medical cards includes people dying from cancer who are unable to afford chemotherapy and patients with kidney failure who could not get dialysis.

The medical card battle is far from over.