PROTEST OUTSIDE LEINSTER HOUSE OVER MEDICAL CARD CHANGES...."The over-70s medical card plays a key role in helping many older people remain living in their own homes. The guaranteed access it provided for holders to a GP meant that their health and well being is monitored and protected at community level, thereby taking pressure off the acute hospitals and nursing homes.To reintroduce the means test flies in the face of the current push towards community care and the drive to keep older people out of hospitals and nursing homes. It will not result in any reduction in illness among older people but ensure that by the time they came to doctors surgeries that their illnesses would be more advanced.
There are currently more than 420,000 people aged 70 or over living in the 26 County State....."
(From here.)
"In the budget this week the government decided to scrap automatic medical cards for over 70s...some GPs charge €60 a visit never mind prescriptions or other medicines like say the flu vaccine, which cost my girlfriend €35 during a recent visit to her GP. So imagine if you were 70 years old retired, trying to scrape together enough money to buy food, pay the increased ESB and gas bills, then save a little money to buy Christmas presents for the grand kids and not doing anything fancy like foreign holidays. Just gettin by in Ireland today. €95 would be a good chunk out of your weekly income of say €241 which would put you over the limits...."
(From here.)
The 'Irish Senior Citizens Parliament' will be holding a one-hour lunch-time protest rally outside Leinster House , Kildare Street , Dublin, on Wednesday 22nd October 2008 beginning at 12.30pm to show their objection at the unjust withdrawal of medical cards for those aged over 70 : the greedy , callous and unproductive bastards that 'work' in that institution will not themselves be affected by any of the cut-backs they impose as they are well-insulated , financially , from the effects of their own actions. We hope the sons , daughters and extended families of those elderly people will storm that filthy institution and destroy it from within whilst their aged relatives are protesting as best they can outside - every man and woman inside that premises should be made pay , physically , for attempting to punish old people for the financial and moral blunders that the well-suited leeches themselves are responsible for...
Sharon.
