Mary Wallace (Meath East, Fianna Fail)

I thank Deputy Durkan for raising this matter. I am pleased to have the opportunity to set out the position regarding the health repayment scheme.

Following consideration of the implications of the Supreme Court judgment of 16 February 2005, the Government approved a statutory based repayment scheme. The Health (Repayment Scheme) Act 2006 provides a clear legal framework to repay recoverable health charges for publicly funded long-term residential care, including contracted beds in private institutions. All those fully eligible persons who were wrongly charged for publicly funded long-term residential care and are alive will have their charges repaid in full. The estates of all those fully eligible persons who were wrongly charged for publicly funded long-term residential care and died since 9 December 1998 will have the charges repaid in full.

Recoverable health charges are charges that were imposed on persons with full eligibility under the Health (Charges for In-patient Services) Regulations 1976, as amended in 1987, or charges for inpatient services only raised under the Institutional Assistance Regulations 1954, as amended in 1965. It is only these charges which are repayable under the scheme.

The health repayment scheme was launched in August 2006 and is administered by the Health Service Executive in conjunction with the appointed scheme administrator, KPMG-McCann Fitzgerald. The scheme is progressing as speedily as possible and every effort is being made to settle claims as quickly as possible. The HSE has advised that the vast majority of offers under the scheme will have been issued by November of this year. It has also indicated that as of 10 October 2008, more than 34,500 claim forms have been received, 13,843 payments totalling more than €288 million have been processed and 18,365 offers totalling more than €344 million have been made.

The time taken to process an application under the scheme is dependent on the complexity of the application, namely, the number of institutions in which the patient resided and the availability of accurate information on the amount of repayment due. In this regard, all relevant HSE facilities, more than 350 in total, have been visited by the scheme administrator to retrieve records of payment. In addition, the HSE has been working closely with the scheme administrator to put in place the necessary protocols to facilitate the processing of any claims where there are incomplete records available on a patient's period of long-stay care or on payments made. These protocols have been developed in accordance with section 6 of the Act.

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