Patients who need anti-depressants have stopped using them and "wheezy" children are not using inhalers to prevent asthma attacks because they can't afford them, according to a new patient advocacy group.
The group, which comprises family doctors from a number of practices in Dublin, said many of these patients' families are hard-working, but are just above the threshold for medical card eligibility and are therefore being denied access to basic medical care on a daily basis.
Dr Brid Hollywood, a GP in Ballymun who is part of the advocacy group, said yesterday that more and more children are presenting with acute asthma attacks as a result of not using preventive inhalers because their families cannot afford them.
"There is no doubt we will see deaths from this," she said.
The group of which she is part is called DISC (Doctors in Support of their Communities) and it plans to mount a concerted campaign to highlight the constant suffering of patients and to lobby for improvements. It says it will be motivating patients to exercise their votes in forthcoming elections.
Dr Hollywood said the failure to increase the threshold for eligibility was resulting in "real suffering".
She gave the example of a woman she saw recently whose husband had died and who had difficulty meeting the cost of the funeral.
Yet because she had a job, albeit on a low wage, she was in danger of losing her medical card.
"These would be people who would be working very hard. They are pulling themselves out of that low-income poverty trap and are really, really trying. Now having got jobs, even if they are low paid, they are losing their medical cards," she said.
Another GP in the Ballymun health centre, Dr David Gibney, said some people on social welfare have even had their medical card taken off them and they have had to fight to get them back.
"We had a woman on a widow's allowance and a living-alone allowance and because that put her over the income limit for a medical card it was stopped and it took three months of fighting to get it back again," he said.
He said doctors who were part of DISC were incredibly frustrated at Government policy and how it was affecting their patients.
They felt it was time for them to take action.
Dr Hollywood pointed out that health boards often grant medical cards in cases of individual hardship but she was not talking about the suffering in these cases, she said.
She was talking about a whole population who were suffering every day because they could not afford basics such as anti-depressants.
To see Dr Hollywood or Dr Gibney costs €30, which is well below the cost of seeing many other GPs and they regularly have to waive the fee.
However, they say their concern is purely their patients rather than their own pockets. For example, they often have to prescribe cheaper drugs for patients which may not be the best ones for them, simply because they know the patients won't be able to afford them otherwise.