The first offers of nursing home refunds, averaging €20,000 to €25,000, will be made this week. Those who get them have 28 days to appeal the amount if they are not happy. However, it emerged yesterday that they have nobody to appeal their offer to at this stage as appeals officers have not yet been appointed.
In response to queries from The Irish Times yesterday, the Health Service Executive (HSE) confirmed the first offers of refunds would be sent out this week but said it was the Department of Health's responsibility to appoint the appeals officers.
The Department of Health confirmed no appeals officers had yet been appointed but said it was now in the process of recruiting them.
"Work is proceeding in establishing the Health Repayment Scheme Appeals Office, which will be located in the Irish Life Mall, Dublin 1. Administrative staff have been appointed to the appeals office and the department is currently in the process of recruiting an appeals officer(s)," it said.
Age Action Ireland has criticised the fact that refund applications are being processed without any appeals officers in place: "We are surprised and taken aback by it. We assumed so much planning had gone into this scheme that they would not commence processing applications until the appeals officers were in place," its spokesman, Eamon Timmins, said.
What was happening was "another example of lack of joined-up thinking" in the Department of Health, he said. "It's just bad governance," he added. He said the failure to appoint appeals officers on time should not be allowed to affect people's right to have 28 days to appeal.
Minister for Health Mary Harney recently told the Dáil health committee that the HSE contracted a company to implement the health repayments scheme.
"I understand that 11,000 claims have been verified, 8,000 in respect of those alive and 3,000 in respect of estates. The procedure is that the individuals or their estate will be contacted. They have 28 days to accept what is on offer and if they do not, they can appeal.
"The average payment is between €20,000 and €25,000. It is estimated 20,000 people are alive who qualify for repayments as well as between 40,000 and 50,000 estates. It will take some time to make all the repayments. The first monies will be repaid in November," she said.
The repayments arise out of a decision by the State to charge medical card holders in public nursing homes or in contract beds in private nursing homes for nursing home care from the mid-1970s up to late 2004 even though there was no legal basis for the charges.
The Travers report, published last year, pointed to "significant failures of administration" and "long-term systemic corporate failure" as reasons why the Department of Health had allowed the illegal charging to continue for so long even though it was "well aware" there were legal concerns surrounding the practice.
The bill for refunds is expected to run to about €1 billion.