Hospitals have failed to collect almost €400 million in patient charges over the past three years, new figures show.
The figures, provided by the Health Service Executive (HSE), show more than €117 million in hospital charges remained uncollected at the end of 2005, some €128 million at the end of 2006 and €152 million at the end of the third quarter of 2007.
Fine Gael TD Denis Naughten, who received the data in reply to a parliamentary question, said yesterday it was galling to see the HSE imposing cutbacks to recoup a deficit of €255 million in 2007 when more than €150 million in hospital charges had gone uncollected that year. "It is a poor indicator of the HSE's ability to get value for money when hundreds of millions in hospital fees are going uncollected," he said.
"In 2005 and 2006 the level of uncollected fees amounts to almost 40 per cent of the total fees levied in those years. This would not be acceptable in any other business and the health Minister's lack of oversight of the health budget has allowed the situation to disimprove drastically each year," he added.
The uncollected charges include A&E fees, inpatient bed charges, long-stay charges and patient bills following road traffic incidents.
A spokesman for the HSE said it made every effort to collect outstanding fees and some of the money outstanding at the end of 2005 could have been collected in 2006 or 2007 or may indeed remain to be collected.
"It would be extremely misleading to give the impression that the HSE has outstanding debts that it is not pursuing," he said. "You always head into one year carrying debt from the year before which is waiting to be collected and any large business will always have a small percentage of bad debt."
In the reply to Mr Naughten's Dáil question, the HSE's director of finance, Liam Woods, said it was taking longer to collect fees following road traffic incidents since the Personal Injuries Assessment Board (PIAB) was set up.
"Awards are [ now] paid directly to the claimant and the hospital must seek payment from this award subsequently. In the past, awards which were made by the courts were paid via a legal representative, who discharged costs before making a payment of the net award to the claimant," he wrote.