Repaying illegal charges for elderly to cost an extra €100m

REPAYING TENS of thousands of older people and their families who were illegally charged for public nursing-home beds is set …

REPAYING TENS of thousands of older people and their families who were illegally charged for public nursing-home beds is set to cost €100 million more than anticipated.

The final bill is now set to cost the State at least €465 million. Just over a year ago the Health Service Executive said it expected the total cost of the scheme to amount to about €350 million.

In addition, the Department of Health is facing 340 sets of legal proceedings from older people or their families who have bypassed the repayments scheme and are seeking compensation through the courts.

The repayment scheme for long-stay care refunds those wrongly charged despite having medical card entitlement to free care over a 30-year period from the mid-1970s until 2004.

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A number of factors have contributed to bills increasing dramatically. These include higher than anticipated numbers applying for the compensation, and significant numbers successfully appealing the size of the award given to them.

Latest figures show that out of 35,000 applications for compensation, a total of 21,150 offers of repayment have been made by the department totalling €431 million. These equate to average payments of just over €20,000.

When administrative fees are included, the total bill is set to be in the region of €465 million. The scheme is administered by the HSE, in conjunction with KPMG and McCann Fitzgerald.

In a further bid to stem the cost of the repayments scheme, internal Government records obtained by The Irish Times show that the department is prepared to fight a decision to pay awards to some 850 people with disabilities in the High Court.

These clients, resident in three organisations – Cheeverstown, St Michael’s House in Dublin and the Daughters of Charity – claim they were unfairly excluded from the repayment scheme.

These 850 cases were initially rejected but have since been successfully appealed to an independent office, known as the health repayment scheme’s appeals office.

This decision could have major implications for the Government and lead to thousands of other people with disabilities successfully obtaining compensation.

On foot of this, the department and the HSE lodged joint appeals to these 850 awards in the High Court in January of this year, a fact that has only now entered the public domain. They maintain that “no recoverable health charges” were paid by clients of these organisations.

In general, most decisions (77 per cent) appealed to the independent appeals office have been upheld.

Officials say the scheme has taken several years to administer because of “deficiencies” in claims forms that had to be rectified before they could be processed.

Two-thirds of the applications failed to provide critical information and the administrator had to write to the claimant seeking that information.