Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I, too, welcome the motion and the fact that the Government has accepted it. As well as the obvious benefit for those in receipt of domiciliary care allowance who will receive the medical card automatically, the other great advantage is that it eliminates the unnecessary hassle of filling in forms, with a vast amount of paperwork attached, particularly where a person is trying to prove not only medical expenses have been incurred in treating a medical condition but also ancillary expenses. Many of those applying for medical cards do not realise that, for example, the cost of travelling from a rural part of Ireland to Dublin and staying overnight is a legitimate expense they can include when making their case for a medical card. I welcome anything that simplifies life.

There are other groups who do not necessarily receive domiciliary care allowance but who are clearly identified as having young people with medical conditions. The Minister should consider extending it to such categories as quickly as possible and obviating the necessity to make a case.

During the term of the last Government I knew of a young person who on first meeting them I thought was six or seven years of age but who was actually 14 or 15 and suffering from a rare genetic disorder. It took us a year to obtain a medical card. The first battle we had to fight was to retain the medical card held until a decision was made. It then went to appeal and went on and on. The parents had a modest middle income. The child needed care 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and a medical card was being held back at a time when children in the whole of their health were being given free general practitioner, GP, cards.

I live in a world where finance will always be finite. Some people seem to live in a parallel universe where there is unlimited finance and no choices to be made. I have disagreed with the Government’s policy of trying to give GP cards to everybody in the country and not giving full medical cards to those who really need them. We have our priorities upside down, given that very wealthy people are going to wind up with GP cards, while people who endure huge hardship cannot get their hands on a full medical card. As the Ministers of State opposite know from their time on this side of the House, many ancillary issues arise in not having a medical card.

Another practical point concerns the interminable reviews of the circumstances of people with discretionary medical cards or old people. How many old people, over the age of 66 years, does the Minister of State know whose incomes go up after they turn 66 years, unless they win the lotto? Is it worthwhile hassling them with forms and worry, year after year while carrying out these reviews?

Another habit of the Health Service Executive, HSE, is that when a person applies, it writes back looking for some information. There might be a delay in obtaining that information because the person might not understand what is required, or there are family circumstances and the HSE cancels the application, instead of holding it. The person concerned then has to reapply, receive the documentation again and new forms and fill them in again. That is lunacy, bureaucracy gone mad and totally unfeeling. I have had to table parliamentary questions to try to get a medical card application held over while going through this ridiculous process, when the HSE already had the information, to obtain the ancillary information required. I knew of a case where the information was not provided because the people in charge of the medical card section had not even asked for it.

Another simple case will show how crazy the system is. Somebody who lives 60 miles to the west of Galway city came to see me in the past few days. The person concerned has to travel into the city for dialysis and seeks transport in and out. The sensible thing for them to do is to arrange the outpatient appointment for the same day, but the taxi for dialysis patients leaves before outpatients are seen to. The person concerned has been told there is no financial support available. They cannot drive having been on dialysis. Their spouse cannot drive and they have to get by some miracle from Galway to the western tip of Connemara, Ballyconneely, at their own expense. Is that a humane system? That is common throughout the country and every Deputy can tell the Minister of State about such cases. The amount of money involved in these real hardship cases is very small. We need practicality, common sense and discretion to be brought back into the system.

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