Denis Naughten (Roscommon-South Leitrim, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am disappointed that the Government is not prepared to accept the principle of my amendment, which is that the HSE, through its office in Finglas, should have, if required, access to the database held by the Department of Children and Youth Affairs and the Department of Education and Skills in regard to children under the age of six years who are attending either the education system or the preschool system. This covers one-third of the children who will be provided with eligibility under this proposed medical card scheme. The parents of some 60% of these children do not have a medical card. These children are not frequent GP attenders, because their parents cannot afford to fork out €50 or €60 on a GP. Many of these children will end up with non-active cards over a period. I know from my family - I have four small kids - that it is not often that I go to the GP with them; therefore, their cards could very well be non-active. Why, therefore, should we place a responsibility on the HSE to send a probity form which will need to be returned, either by the GP or by the parent, when a request could easily be made to the Department of Education and Skills seeking information on whether Johnny Murphy or whoever is attending school? Why can the Department not be given his age and PPS number and asked whether this five and a half year old is attending school? Then, at that stage, we could go through the probity process if required. This would be preferable to creating more paperwork such as that in the Department of Social Protection, where some €7.5 million is spent on administration of the child benefit scheme. Not all of that paperwork relates to control, but some 600,000 letters a year go out to parents in regard to this scheme, bringing in savings of €75 million a year.

There is a problem currently, but by sharing information across Departments, we can ensure those who are legitimately entitled to a service can get it. We can ensure children under the age of six years who are resident in this country can get the service and that we do not pay GPs for children who are no longer resident here because their families have been forced to emigrate. These families are now living in Australia, Canada, the United States or the United Kingdom, yet GPs in some parts of the country will still be paid for these children until somebody cops on that they are no longer resident in the country. This will then involve a paper trail to try to find out when they left the country and to try to recoup the payments from the GP. We are back to the old policy we had where we were paying GP fees for medical cards for patients who were dead.

We have an opportunity here to close off a potential loophole. I urge the Minister of State to think about this. His colleague gave a commitment this morning that another emergency piece of legislation relating to medical cards is to come before the House next month. I urge him to return to the House next month with an amendment that will deal with this issue. I ask him to commit to the House that he will do this.

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