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

It is, but the people who will be affected by this Bill will encounter another difficulty because, having lost their medical cards, they then will incur further costs to cover their health care and by so doing, will lose their private health insurance. That demographic is the one that has the highest proportion of private health insurance extant and for this reason, I believe this legislation is flawed in many ways.

The primary point I make, however, is the point made at the time by the Labour Party and Fine Gael, as did many others, which is that changing eligibility criteria - or introducing them at all - would have a profound, negative impact on people's health and lives. When my party in government introduced a limit of €1,400, we were told that people would die. The limit now is being reduced to €900 for a couple and by any stretch of imagination, this constitutes a massive reduction within a few years. Consequently, there is no point in pretending this is anything other than what it is, namely, a transfer of medical card cover from those who are over 70 to those who are aged five and under. This is because the Government's budget for primary care has not increased. Had the Minister of State come into the Chamber and stated that, while this measure was being brought in, the Government also had increased the overall primary care budget to make available funding for those aged five and under, one then could logically argue there had been no impact from one to the other. However, as matters stand and there is no other way of dressing it up, this is a direct transfer between those who will lose cards on foot of this measure because of the change in income eligibility to those who are five and under.

The Minister of State keeps asking me what is Fianna Fáil's view on this issue. It always has been that one does not take from the most vulnerable and the most sick and then transfer those funds elsewhere. The Government should at least be honest and open in that regard, which is that it has made a policy decision regarding cover for the under-fives but that it is being funded by the retrenchment of entitlement to those who are 70 and over and more broadly, in respect of discretionary medical cards.

If the Minister of State can convince me otherwise, perhaps we can have a more informed debate some other day on that issue. We will oppose this amendment not because it is a technical amendment, but because it is an amendment to the section of the Bill which reduces the eligibility criteria for a couple from the previous ceiling down to €900. If it was bad at a cap of €72,000, then surely it is worse at what will now be a cap of €36,000 for an individual or €54,000 for a couple. For those reasons we will oppose the amendment. The amendment may be a technical one in the mind of the Minister of State, but it is fundamental in my mind.

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