Billy Kelleher (Cork North Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The €75 charge is relevant because patients with a medical card are exempt from paying it. I accept that there has never been an automatic entitlement to a medical card. What is clear, however, is that the clinical review panel has raised the bar so high in terms of assessing entitlement based on medical need that applicants are increasingly failing to qualify. Of all the issues to be dealt with in the health service, this one is surely deserving of immediate attention. What is happening is at variance with what we are being told in the Dáil. I cannot countenance a situation where people in such circumstances are having their applications rejected by the clinical panel. I acknowledge that there never was an entitlement in this regard, but the situation in practice has, for many years, been that any person with cancer was granted a medical card on the basis of an assessment of need. That is no longer happening and such patients are being charged €75 upon admission to hospital for chemotherapy treatment. It is a very unfortunate development.

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