GP visit card application denied, unclear how they calculated income

My income, which comes entirely from investments, is below the GP visit card threshold for my category, however my application was denied as they claim my income is above it. Their refusal letter simply shows one number for what they claim my investment income is, which is substantially higher than my calculation of it. Before I consider appealing, it would be helpful if I could see how they arrived at their income figure. Is this something that they are likely to provide to me, and, if so, how should I request it?

I provided them with all of my dividend statements, and statements from my bank accounts showing little or no interest. The only investment I am not sure how they would treat is a very small amount in an old Quinn Life fund. Since it is an accumulating fund, I imagine that they will apply their assessment based on the value of the investment (€4/week per €1000 capital, etc.), but that alone can't explain the large discrepancy between their calculation and mine.

Appeal the decision?

Thank you, that is the plan, but, as I noted:

userabc said:

Before I consider appealing, it would be helpful if I could see how they arrived at their income figure.

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I think the chance of success of the appeal would be higher if I could see where they went wrong in their income calculation so that I can explain why it is incorrect.

Not sure what help you expect here - without data, it is not possible to have an opinion on your income and eligibility further a GP Visit card

Do they not take the amount of the investments into account as well? It's not just the income from them surely. Isn't it like social welfare means test where they deduct a few quid based on different amounts of savings or in this case add it on to income. I have searched for what I am talking about and this is the closest I can find, page 25 in case it doesn't go direct to page.

jpd said:

Not sure what help you expect here - without data, it is not possible to have an opinion on your income and eligibility further a GP Visit card

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It seems that I must have been unclear, so I apologise. I am not asking for your opinion on my eligibility. My question was whether anyone knows of a way to ask for how the HSE arrived at the figure they gave for my income. It would be helpful to know this before I appeal so that I can explain why their calculation is wrong. The only email address I have found it clientregistration@hse.ie, so if no one knows of a better way I will try writing to that address, but I suspect that they only deal with technical questions about submitting an application rather than discussing the eligibility determination.

Monbretia said:

Do they not take the amount of the investments into account as well? It's not just the income from them surely.

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Thank you for the link. On the page 25 that you referred to, it says that there are two ways they can assess savings and investments. You can either show them what your actual income from the savings and investments is, and they will use that, or they can use the rules further down page 25 to calculate an income based on the capital value of your savings and investments. I suspect that, even though I provided them with the information about the income from the savings and investments, they used the rules and capital values for some of them.

Sue Ellen said:

Is the information on Citizens' Information of any help

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Thank you, but it contains the same information as the document that @Monbretia linked to, noting that they can calculate income from savings and investments in the two ways that I described above.

Many investment products don't pay interest/dividends annually. The 10 year National Solidarity Bond, for example, doesn't pay any return for a decade. Until last year, Ryanair didn't pay annual dividends to shareholders.

This would mean that someone who had €10,000,000 worth of Ryanair shares and €500,000 invested in the 10 year Solidarity Bond would have been eligible for a medical card as both investments would have generated €0 in annual income. That, although an extreme example, is I believe the rationale behind bodies such as the HSE and the Department of Social Protection using the notional income formula set out in the above links to calculate eligibility for their various schemes.

userabc said:

Thank you for the link. On the page 25 that you referred to, it says that there are two ways they can assess savings and investments. You can either show them what your actual income from the savings and investments is, and they will use that, or they can use the rules further down page 25 to calculate an income based on the capital value of your savings and investments. I suspect that, even though I provided them with the information about the income from the savings and investments, they used the rules and capital values for some of them.

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I suspect so too. But does the figure for the investment income they have imputed to you look more-or-less like the figure you would expect them to arrive at if they used the "capital values" method method?

One other point: It looks to me from the booklet that monbretia linked to that, if you give them bank statements, etc, showing the capital value of your savings, they they will use the capital values method, even if the bank statements also show the actual amount of income received. As a policy that makes sense, for the reason Marsupial points out. I think they only use the actual income method in cases where, for whatever reason, the capital value method can't be used — e.g. if you own shares in a private company, the value of the shares is hard to compute (because they cannot be freely bought or sold) but the dividends they pay are easily ascertained.

It does sound like they always (?) calculate a nominal imputed income from the applicant's assets as outlined in the link below regardless of what the actual income (e.g. interest, dividends, distributions, etc.) is. Maybe this is to allow for other events such as possible occasional cashing in of assets etc.?
As @TomEdison suggests you should be able to use their method to calculate a nominal imputed income and see if it correlates to their figure. If it does then that's presumably the answer.

Otherwise you could maybe just appeal it and detail that the reason for your appeal is that your don't understand how they arrived at your imputed income, you would like to see those calculations, and know why they didn't use your actual figures for income.

It seems like this from the above link. My own calculations of the approximate implied earnings from investments in bold.

Single person​

If you are single, we do not assess the first €36,000 of your savings, investments or property.

For the next:

• €36,001 to €46,000 - we add €1 to your weekly income for every €1,000 - 5%
• €46,001 to €56,000 - we add €2 to your weekly income for every €1,000 - 10%
• more than €56,000 - we add €4 to your weekly income for every €1,000 - 20%

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