Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State. With due respect, putting the onus on drug companies to make the application when they are part of a for-profit industry - and let us be very clear about what it is - is absolutely farcical. It is not a patient-led response nor is it a citizens-of-the-Republic-led response. The fact is that what we are about is deferring the risk and the legal burden onto a practitioner or a consultant. The person who pays the cost in the middle of that is a woman who either does not get her prescription, does not get her funding, or may in fact be hospitalised at a cost to the State. The cost includes the hospitalisation, the woman's health, the bed that is unnecessarily taken up, and a woman on a drip in a hospital, as some of the patients who need treatment have told me. To be quite honest, the whole arrangement of an exempt list and our funding relationship with that needs to be reviewed and needs to be patient-centred.