Dr Ronan Boland, a GP working in Blackpool, Cork, says he regularly sees patients who leave it until the last minute to turn up at his surgery because they cannot afford to see a doctor.
For this reason he was hoping provision would be made to extend full medical card eligibility to more of the population in this year's Estimates. It did not happen.
And while Minister for Health Mary Harney defended her decision not to extend medical card eligibility yesterday, pointing out that she had already done so earlier in the year, Dr Boland claims that with inflation running at 4 to 5 per cent, the income threshold for medical cards will in real terms drop next year when eligibility has not been increased now to counterbalance that.
He added that only 30 of his patients had obtained doctor-only medical cards when he would have expected around 200 of them to have done so. People, he said, were not bothering with the bureaucracy of applying for them when they did not cover the cost of drugs. "I feel they are a failed experiment," he said.
He also expressed concern that the amount allocated to primary care this year was less than last year.
Last year some €16 million was allocated for primary care services; this year the amount is €13 million. He fails to see how this will allow for the rapid roll-out of primary care teams, 100 of which have been promised each year over a five-year period.
He also said patients were still waiting too long to get simple diagnostic tests done and he saw nothing in the Estimates that would change that.
But he welcomed the allocation of funding to roll out breast cancer screening across the State, as well as funding to get a national cervical screening programme set up. "It's something that is long overdue," he said.
- Eithne Donnellan