P J Sheehan (Cork South West, Fine Gael)

——have the guts to admit they got it wrong, and to vote to reverse this decision which tried to take the full medical card from nine out of ten elderly people entitled to this scheme.

My real concern is that many of these people whose sense of security has been taken from them will be unable to go to their doctor or afford the prescribed drugs and will end up in hospital at a greater cost to the taxpayer. Was this decision taken during the summer? Was the budget brought forward by two months in order to allow the overburdened bureaucrats in the Health Service Executive time to process the means test? The Government should instead have been consulting the Irish Medical Organisation.

Now that we have a self-assessed medical card, would the Government not like another two months in order to re-draft the budget in respect of the medical card, the Lenihan levies, the savage cuts in teaching posts, the welfare payments to the disabled, the charging of nurses for parking while on night shift? Will the Government charge the Bray firemen for their parking last Friday night?

The historical facts of this matter offer a classic example of Fianna Fáil stroke politics. In the year 2000, during a campaign from this side of the House, it was pointed out that only 29% of the population were being awarded medical cards while the general medical scheme agreement with the Irish Medical Association allowed up to 40% of the population to be covered by this scheme. Under pressure to do the right thing and raise the income limits, the then Minister for Health, Deputy Micheál Martin, chose to do all the wrong things. He proposed at the stroke of a pen that the medical card should be extended, without reference to income, to everyone aged over 70 on 1 May 2001 in order to entice the grey vote to vote for Fianna Fáil.

Deputy Martin's mismanagement does not end there, however. He underestimated by more than half the number of people aged over 70. He had no comprehension of the medical card scheme and so had to renegotiate a whole new scheme at short notice while fighting the South Tipperary by-election, in which he had no room to wriggle.

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