THOUSANDS more people will have to start paying prescription charges. The Foresters and Oddfellows friendly societies have stopped covering the fee, which rose to £2.70 as of yesterday.
‘We are disappointed. This has been a very hard decision to make but if we wanted to continue in business as a friendly society, something major had to happen,’ said Jill Dawe, manager of the local branch of the Foresters Friendly Society, which alone has about 6,000 customers who will be affected.
‘It probably will make a difference to the number of people who join up with us, but people also join us because we are competitive with our prices and we can still keep our premiums low.’
With a significant rise in medical costs over the past few years both societies, which are non-profit making organisations, were faced with two options.
Firstly, they could continue to cover prescription charges by dramatically increasing premiums, which could have been by as much as 35% for Foresters customers, according to Mrs Dawe.
Secondly, the societies could stop paying prescription fees, thus keeping any increase in premiums to a minimum.
‘Increasing premiums would seriously affect OAPs and low earners and we did not think that was fair, so we were left with only one other thing to do and that was to drop in line with other health coverage providers by no longer paying for prescriptions,’ said Mrs Dawe.
A spokesman for Oddfellows Friendly Society agreed that it had been a regrettable decision but the increase in fees had made it extremely hard to cover costs.
Elderly members of these societies will not be affected by the change, as nobody in Guernsey over 65 has to pay a prescription charge.
Article posted on 2nd January, 2008 - 12.00am
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