Bureaucracy must not prevent people receiving medical care- Costello

20 July 2011

by Cllr Joe Costello

Motion on the Adjournment:

"The Need for the Minister for Health to Explain Why a Person in Receipt of Income less than the Supplementary Welfare Allowance is Ineligible to Apply for a Medical Card"

I thank the Minister for coming in to take this debate.

I have tabled this motion to request the Minister to deal urgently with a situation that has been brought to my attention by a number of constituents who have been refused medical cards for the bizarre reason that they earn too little and fall below a minimum income limit - rather than exceed the income limit!

This ruling is being applied to self-employed people, mature students on grants and people who have found for various reasons that they are not entitled to social welfare payments.

To illustrate the case, I would draw the Minister's attention to two cases.

A constituent recently graduated from College with a First Class Degree and was encouraged by the College to follow with a Masters and PhD programme. She was hopeful of starting the Masters Programme but was informed that the mature students grant has been cut from over €6,100 to just €2,300 because from this year mature students do not have automatic entitlement to the "non-adjacent rate". The mature student grant was equivalent to the supplementary welfare rate and so she had retained her entitlement to a medical card during her under-graduate years. Now that the maintenance grant has fallen below the supplementary welfare rate, she has been informed that if she accepts the place in college on the reduced maintenance grant she will lose her medical card. This is bureaucracy gone mad. This first class honours graduate has an opportunity to progress through education and greatly enhance their employment prospects and their contribution to the state, but is now being excluded from the education system. The cut in her grant means that she is being discriminated against because she is already living in Dublin. A mature student from the country could move to Dublin and be entitled to the full grant.

The second case is of another constituent who is earning just €72 per week, who has worked since he was fifteen years of age and claimed unemployment assistance for just three weeks in his entire life. He is now being told that he earns too little to be considered for a medical card as he is not "Financially independent, with means that are within the Medical Card/GP visit card guidelines. For a person to be considered financially independent s/he must be in receipt of income equivalent to or greater than the current standard rate of Supplementary Welfare Allowance".

The preservation of our citizens' health and well being must be a priority for the state. It is imperative that the operation of the medical card scheme is carried out fairly and that those most in need of health care have recourse to seeking proper medical care. The Minister should review the scheme to ensure that bureaucratic guidelines do not prevent people who are most in need of medical cards from receiving them.

I am calling on the Minister to reverse this anomaly