Mr. Fintan Hourihan:

The fees paid could be anywhere between 50% and 60% of what is charged to private patients. Dentists obviously have to recover their costs because, as I said, they do not get any State support towards their operating costs. Effectively, for people in the medical card scheme, dentists are cross-subsidising them from their private patients. As Dr. Rymer said, apart from the economics of it, and we saw a significant increase in fees just a few years ago, the problem is this has ultimately made no real difference to the participation by dentists or treatments provided, which confirms this is not about money. There are restrictions on the treatments that can be provided and rules that do not allow dentists to provide the same level of care to medical card patients. It is a real problem if there are four dentists in a town, two or three of whom were on the medical card scheme previously, but that town is then left with one. As patients, unlike those under medical doctors, are not assigned to a panel for a specific doctor, all the patients will then arrive at the door of the one last, standing dentist in the scheme and that is-----