Medical card backlog cleared in April

JOINT COMMITTEE ON HEALTH AND CHILDREN:A BACKLOG of almost 60,000 medical card applications, built up over a six-month period, has been fully cleared, an Oireachtas committee was told yesterday.

Laverne McGuinness, national director of integrated services performance and financial management at the Health Service Executive (HSE), said the backlog, created when medical card processing was centralised to a facility in Finglas, north Dublin, was completely cleared at the end of April.

Ms McGuinness also told the committee on health and children that the HSE was analysing €1.48 million in historical over-payments to GPs after the death of some medical card holder patients.

GPs are paid a capitation grant for each medical card patient on their books; they are not paid a per-visit fee. Currently, when a person dies the HSE becomes aware of it through the registration of the death. However, in the past this did not happen, and some GPs went on being paid for patients long after they had died.

Ms McGuinness said analysis of the data would be completed by the end of the month, and would then be “followed up” with GPs.

The committee was also told a €35,000 review carried out by consultants PricewaterhouseCoopers found there were potential excess medical cards worth between €65 million and €210 million in the system.

The figures were to be treated with “extreme caution”, Ms McGuinness said, and there would need to be a “forensic analysis” of the medical card database to establish a “true estimate”.

The excess cards could be attributable to people having acquired a card and then having emigrated, or no longer being eligible for cards that have not yet expired.

The committee was told the HSE was writing to people who had “inactive” cards, unused for a period of months, to establish whether they were still in the country.

Ms McGuinness said a backlog of almost 60,000 medical card applications, including new ones and renewals, had built up by the end of January this year.

She said the backlog had been fully cleared, and 96 per cent of cards were being processed within 15 days. Some 1.7 million medical cards were in circulation along with just under 127,000 GP visit cards.

Ms McGuinness said it was an astounding number.

Deputy Colm Burke (FG) said it looked like there would be two million cards in the system by the end of the year.

“That would mean four out of every nine persons in the country will have a medical card,” he said. This would put the system under “extreme pressure”.

Committee chairman Jerry Buttimer (FG) said in many cases the people were still struggling with the application system and were finding it “chaotic and frustrating”.

Ms McGuinness said a simpler application form had been drafted, and a new head of customer services would begin work next month.