Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Medical cards in Ireland are means-tested, so it is in almost all cases based on income. Medical cards are given to people who have a terminal illness. There are about 180,000 discretionary medical cards for other reasons. We did much work on this when I was Minister for Health. It is a detailed report and it is worth reading. It is over 100 pages along and was done by all the medical and other experts. They came to the conclusion that it would not be right to automatically give discretionary medical cards for some illnesses and not others, because who is to say that one illness should qualify and the other should not? Even within an illness, there are different types of illness and different levels of severity. There is the whole issue of comorbidities, where a person might have two or three illnesses. They came to the conclusion that listing some conditions that would automatically qualify for discretionary medical cards and others that would not, of the 1,000 or so conditions that exist, would not be the right approach. Like I say, I think the HSE is as sympathetic as it can be when it comes to cases such as this. As the Minister of State, Deputy Butler, pointed out, over 180,000 discretionary medical cards are currently active in the State.

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