Doctors have criticised weekend news reports portraying their incomes from the medical card scheme as excessive writes Dr Muiris Houston Medical Correspondent
More than 200 GPs received payments in excess of €250,000, according to the latest report from the GMS Payments Board, details of which appeared in yesterday's Sunday Business Post and Sunday Tribune.
Eight practices received payments in excess of €400,000. 2,100 family doctors operate the medical care scheme, with an average payment per practice of €140,000.
The figures include payments for practice staff and do not represent an individual doctor's income.
Dr James Reilly, president of the Irish Medical Organisation (IMO), said the presentation of the GMS Payments Board annual report "lacked subtlety".
Dr Reilly, who along with Dr Martin Daly, the IMO's GP committee chairman, was involved in a heated row with the Minister for Health last week over Mr Martin's failure to extend eligibility limits for medical cards said the Minister faced " a credibility gap on this issue".
Dr Reilly, who is a north County Dublin GP received a gross payment of €214,000 under the GMS Scheme in 2003. He told The Irish Times the figure covered payments for three full-time and one part-time doctor in his two centre practice.
The gross income figure also included payments covering the salary of one practice secretary and one practice nurse. His practice employees two other practice secretaries, an additional practice nurse and a practice manager for whom no State reimbursement is received.
The IMO leader strongly rejected the portrayal of the GMS scheme as a "medical card gravy train". He said at least 50 per cent of the reported medical care income would be paid out as practice expenses by doctors.
Asked whether he felt the premature release of the GMS figures was in response to last week's public disagreement between the IMO and the Minister for Health over medical card numbers, Dr Reilly said, "it lacks subtlety but I don't want to go any further than that".
However, he said it could be seen as an attempt to "distract people from the real issue, which is there are at least 250,000 Irish people suffering hardship because of the Government's failure to extend the medical card scheme".
In its general election manifesto, Fianna Fáil promised to increase the eligibility limits for a medical card so an additional 200,000 people would qualify. The Department of Finance has so far resisted pressure from the Department of Health to raise the qualifying limit on the basis that GMS costs have risen sharply.
Although the 2003 report on the medical card scheme has not yet appeared on the GMS Payments Board website, a spokeswoman for the Minister for Health said yesterday it was the Department's understanding that the report had been published on Friday. She said there was nothing unusual in the timing of the publication.