Madam, – The Government’s proposal to introduce a per item charge for prescriptions of medical card holders is a measure which will hit the sickest and poorest in society.
It is difficult to understand why the Government would target this group while continuing to proclaim that it will protect the most vulnerable during its current cost-cutting exercise.
Minister for Health Mary Harney has argued that the measure is necessary to raise revenue for the exchequer and to address the issue of overprescribing of medication.
Age Action agrees that overprescribing is an issue. Several studies, published in peer-reviewed medical journals in recent years, have highlighted the problem of inappropriate prescribing to older people in Ireland. However, imposing a financial penalty on patients will do nothing to stop this. Medical card patients do not write their own prescriptions.
The reality is that this measure may have a more negative result. Imposing a financial penalty on people with low incomes or high medical costs provides a disincentive for them to fill their prescriptions.
They do not write these prescriptions, so the only power they have in the process is to ration their medication and seek to fill them less often.
The bottom line is that some people on long-term medications may begin taking less medication than is recommended by their doctor. Obviously this is not the intention of the Minister’s charge.
There is also a better way of raising revenue, rather than having to target the poorest and sickest – for that is the criteria for holding a medical card for most card holders.
The Irish Medical Organisation has suggested that it could provide savings of up to €300 million – 10 times the intended revenue target for the new prescription charge. They propose this could be done by shifting towards prescribing more generic medication and reviewing the prescriptions of patients on a regular basis.
This promises the prospect of a medical service which not only produces greater savings for the exchequer, but also provides improved patient care.
The Government must engage with the medical profession and the pharmaceutical sector to achieve better value and improved practices, rather than taking the more damaging option of targeting the sickest and poorest of citizens. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – The Minister for Health once again displays this Government’s disregard for the vulnerable in proposing to introduce a charge for prescriptions under the medical card scheme. The only possible reason for such a move is that it is easy to implement. It will achieve no element of badly needed reform and will only serve to tax those who have least to give.
I challenge the Minister to break the exploitative stranglehold that the pharmaceutical industry and retail pharmacy sector have had on the people of this country for far too long and to leave the vulnerable alone.
Our son, who is profoundly intellectually disabled, is a medical card holder; he has no income of his own. One of the medications he receives every month costs the State €28.55; the exact same medication costs on average €10 in continental Europe (over the counter). I would love to save this State 65 per cent of the cost of our son’s medication and avoid the need for a prescription. That this level of profiteering at the expense of the taxpayers of Ireland has not been tackled for decades is a disgrace. – Yours, etc,
Madam, In Ireland, the real rip-off in the cost of pharmaceuticals to the State is perpetrated by the producers of generic products. The small difference in the price of proprietary products and generics reveals vast profit-taking by the generics sector, which does no research to produce the new treatments that benefit mankind.
Bearing in mind the huge cost involved in producing a new drug and bringing it to market, a process involving more failures than successes, it is understandable that the major proprietary drug producers have to earn sufficient profit to provide the resources needed for further research and development.
Much more focus is needed in targeting the generics producers who do nothing to advance solutions to existing and emerging health problems. – Yours, etc,