Mr. Fintan Hourihan:

I will give an example of a dentist I spoke to who said five dentists in his practice held contracts under the medical card scheme until quite recently. It is now down to one. However, when he checked the database published on the HSE website, he saw all five were still listed as being active, so we believe the official statistics are grossly overstated. My best guess is fewer than 1,000 dentists are currently participating in the scheme.