Protest over changes in the medical card scheme for the over 70s (31)

Are you aware that when this vote buying exercise was launched to give all over 70s the Medical Card 7 years ago, that many of these people gave up their private health insurance. They are now in the position that they cannot renew that insurance and as such would not be elligable for cover for 10 years. Please tell me how this benefits the state or is culling the elderly of benefit to the exchequer. You talk as if you are the only one who works hard and the rest of us are your social and mental inferiors. Is this the freedom and human rights your countrymen fought for? You disgust me!

Godsgift, that seems a bit harsh. People can't have a proper understanding of things that don't affect them.

Unfortunately, in the current situation, more and more people, mainly young people, will experience things they have only read about.

Allow him the naivite of youth and lets just hope he doesn't have to learn lessons the hard way.

Sorry wexlady. I lived through Thatcher in the UK and remember pensioners dying. There is no need for this move. An extra half a percent on corporation tax would have soved this and still have kept the country competative. Till people stand up to be counted, nothing will change.

My own son's have the same idealistic views cos they never knew real hardship. They were born in the 90s and I have a good job. Please God the recession will be easing by the time they are finished studying and are looking for work.

It looks like there may be a bit of a Uturn on the medical card. Haven't heard all the details yet though.

Maybe the recession will grant them some humanity. One can only hope.

I have always tried to instill a sense of humanity in them so they are very aware on a lot of levels. I do think you have to experience bad times to really appreciate good times though. I just hope the bad times aren't too bad. Just enough to make them stronger and more appreciative of what they have.

Oh why are the young so ungrateful. I suppose we were the same! I'm in training for Mary Harney!

I never said that the issue does not concern me.

Of course it does. I also stated that I would be making my reservations known and, to be fair, that I'd be doing it through appropriate channels that aren't always the easiest to access, or to stick with when times are tough.

My great-granduncle and great-grandfather are amongst the people who fought for the freedoms and human rights that you mentioned and they are indeed close to my heart. It is entirely as a consequence of that and their values that were transmitted through each generation of my family since then that I hold my nation and it's people very dear.

There is nothing at all callous or indifferent in what I said. I don't understand at all what you are reacting so harshly to.

Ok I just have a few points to make here.

All the money that was in the coffers where has all that gone?? Who was the Minister for Finance that dwindled all this away?? Instead of holding him to task he's allowed to run the country

People that have paid into private pension schemes over the years to top up the state pension, they get taxed on that once the start getting their pension as it is deemed to be an income!! Now these people are also going to be hit with the 1% levy as well as their medical cards being taken away ???

That's a good question LL.

A huge amount of the money in the coffers has been spent, to a very great extent, on funding the current costs of a Public Service whose unions hold every Government, (and it wouldnt matter what shade of Government), pretty much to ransom: Doctors, Teachers, Nurses, Local Authority Employees and the non-frontline HSE staff can bring the country to a standstill if the Government doesn't meet the demands that their Unions make, and the losers, in every event, are both the Government and the Citizen Service-Users.

The other difficulty that situation presents us all with is that wage-inflation is driven across all groups by Public Sector pay, leading to the rapid increase in costs that has seen the flight of manufacturing industry from Ireland that, realistically speaking, has been accelarating over the last 8 - 10 years, if we are honest.

There is a problem in that regard, that we as a Nation will find very hard to address: Why??

If it pleases us, we can throw our Government out on it's ear when Dáil Elections come around. However, there is an extraordinarily powerful group of people at the top of our Public Sector Unions, whom we, the ordinary citizens can't exercise any control over and yet who exert enormous influence over our Public Finances as well as control over the Cost and Access to the Public Services that we would hope to avail of and which any Government would wish to provide. In other words, the Government is under our influence insofar as they continue only at the whim of public opinion. Yet, there are people who exercise enormous influence over what happens to our taxes whom we cannot shoose or influence at all....

How will we solve that one??