Medical cards payments crackdown demanded

By Gary Culliton The HSE has not yet developed an estimate of the level of excess payments in the medical card system, it has emerged. The cost of “a material level of ineligible medical card holding has not been established,” the Comptroller and Auditor General, Seamus McCarthy has said. The Comptroller has recommended that the HSE initiate a “cyclical programme of reviews of eligibility” in respect of random samples of cardholders. This would allow “a reliable baseline estimate of the scale of excess payments to be identified,” McCarthy told the Dáil Public Accounts Committee. Demanding that “prescribed controls are applied”,…