Dr. Claire Keane:

I am happy Deputy Burton has asked that question because as of this year, we place values on medical cards. In terms of what is captured, the model is based on the survey of income and living conditions. As the Deputy stated, an advantage of that is somebody can be in receipt of a benefit and other add-on benefits. We capture the vast majority of those benefits, such as fuel allowance, housing assistance payments, and rent and mortgage supplement. All of those are taken into consideration. The really interesting point is that the CSO actually goes out and looks up the administrative data. Even though it is a survey, the CSO has people's PPS numbers and its interviewers go out and find out what benefits people are getting. That helps inform our model. We can see people are getting carer's allowance plus, perhaps, as I stated, fuel allowance and housing assistance payments or other benefits. We take those into account.

Some non-cash benefits up until now, as the Deputy said, would not have been included but as of this year, we have tried to place a value on medical cards for the reason the Deputy discussed. If I have a medical card, I will lose it if I take up employment, which can be awful. It is not a cash loss for me but it can be a large disincentive. At present we are working on trying to value medical cards, not only based on how much they cost the Government, which pays an amount per medical card holder. We are also building in information in the data. There is a lot of information on how often people go to GPs, if they have been in hospital and how many prescriptions they are getting. We are trying to put values on all of those, as people who are very ill and use the card a lot may place a much higher value on it than those who do not use it.