MEDICAL CARD numbers dropped by almost 9,000 between September 1st and December 1st last year, according to figures released by the HSE.
In December, an additional 26,000 card holders were either found to be ineligible, deceased, or had their cards temporarily extended pending further information, the HSE said.
Doctors have claimed the numbers losing their cards are much higher. One GP said almost 600 patients at his practice had cards cancelled in December alone.
Numbers holding medical cards dropped from 1,701,235 to 1,694,658 from September 1st to December 1st, the HSE said.
In the last two weeks of December over 100,000 card holders were written to. Some 86,000 responded and 72,000 had their cards renewed. Some 14,000 people either needed to supply more information and had their cards temporarily extended, or were ineligible or deceased, and 17,000 did not respond at all.
Applications for medical and GP visit cards have been centrally processed by the HSE since July 2011. As part of the process, doctors log on to a website to ascertain the numbers of cards that have been added or removed.
Dr Owen Clarke, from Navan, Co Meath, said 597 of the patients at his practice had their cards cancelled in December.
The figure was “way above the norm for this practice”, he said, which averaged at 30 cancellations per month. “We were seeing a lot of distressed patients and some were not coming in at all because they believed they had no entitlements,” he said. “Most of the patients were still entitled to the medical card.”
Some 397 of the cards were reinstated earlier this month for a one- to three-month period. Only 30 patients were given back cards for up to 2013.
Dr Helen O’Neill, from Dunboyne, Co Meath, said she carried out a survey of 11 practices and 1,516 patients had lost medical cards in December.
She said she believed the HSE was carrying out “a cynical budgetary exercise to balance books at the end of the year”.
A HSE spokeswoman said medical cards were not cancelled, but holders ceased to be eligible.
