Health boards have stopped paying doctors to treat more than 23,300 deceased patients whose medical cards did not lapse when they died, it emerged yesterday.
An additional 7,200 other cards which were no longer valid had also been removed from the system, according to a letter sent two days ago to the Dáil Committee of Public Accounts from the Department of Health and Children.
This follows the discovery of serious inaccuracies in databases kept by health boards and the General Medical Services division of the Department of Health and Children arising from duplicates and the failure to remove persons who had died or moved away.
Doctors had been receiving annual State payments for "ghost" and duplicate cards even though some patients were dead and others had moved away or been taken into permanent care.
The payment of such fees under the General Medical Services scheme led to controversy last month, when the Comptroller and Auditor General said an initial examination last December suggested that the annual overpayments to doctors were worth about €12 million. The Department of Health and Children will attempt through the Irish Medical Organisation to recover payments to doctors. The committee is expected to resume its inquiries soon.
The matter arose when the cost of offering free medical cards to all individuals over 70 years of age spiralled beyond projection after the scheme was introduced in the second half of 2001. The letter last Wednesday from the Department's general secretary, Mr Michael Kelly, gives no updated indication of the annual cost to the Exchequer. It indicates, however, that an increased number of invalid cards are being discovered in a trawl by health boards. In all, some 30,592 cards have been taken off the system with the greatest numbers being in the Western Health Board and the Eastern Regional Health Authority.
Mr Kelly told the committee on January 16th that about 23,500 cards had been removed, including 22,700 relating to people aged over 70 years of age. This contrasted with an initial examination cited at the same hearing by Mr Purcell, who said 15,000 surplus cards had been uncovered in the over-70 category.
Despite the increased number of strike-offs, Mr Kelly said in his letter that he now expected that the invalid registrations linked to under-70s would be "significantly lower" than estimated in January.
However, he said it was proving "more difficult than anticipated to pin down definitively" the length of time in which individual cards were invalidly live on the system.
"The Department is closely monitoring the actions of the health boards on this matter and I am satisfied that it is being pursued with due diligence and urgency by each of the health boards and the Eastern Regional Health Authority," he wrote.
Mr Kelly added: "The Department is continuing to press the health boards to take all necessary steps to obtain the information required, as quickly as possible but in a manner that will withstand challenge later on."
