I ask my Labour Party colleagues what their grounds are for saying accident and emergency departments suffer as a result of there not being enough medical cards in the system. The charge is €40, not much more than the cost for a general practitioner. The co-op system will alleviate the pressure on the service which those who do not have medical cards are using. The co-op system will alleviate this and work in tandem with the accident and emergency service. I never thought it was in competition with accident and emergency departments. Let me quote from Dr. Jim Kent's feature in the Irish Medical News yesterday on the WestDOC service. It reads as follows: