Its been a while since i posted here about my "fine" after fruitless attempts to get any sense out of NHSBSA I contacted my MP who had already had 2 similar cases sent to her, she wrote to the DOH and got a standard 2 page response that said tough in about 800 words!. She is not letting it stand and is continuing to pester them. I did pay a paltry £1 to avoid any surcharge and have heard nothing from the NHSBSA since
Having spent the evening catching up on the forum, some thirty odd pages, there seem to be a similar thread, there is no joined up system within the NHS to weed out the fraudulent claims or to share information across the various branches of it. I was diagnosed in 1988, I was issued a flimsy paper card back then giving me exemption for my medication. I've no idea if it had an expiry date on it and never bothered as my GP a man i respected and believed said i would be exempt from paying for my medication. Some 27 years later and having been seen by my clinic/specialist/doctor probably 5 times a year so about 135 time give or take and by my pharmacist once a month 324 times, never once i have ever been asked about my MEC, advised of any rule changes, or seen any posters advising me they has to be renewed. Obviously because i was not on the system in 2002 when the rules changed the NHSBSA never wrote to me to tell me i needed to renew my MEC
Once i became aware of the need for a replacement MEC, i got one straight away, I asked my pharmacist why they never asked for one, they said we have been giving your medication for the last 27 years, you are type 1 diabetic so we know you are exempt so we don't need to ask for one.
Common sense has just gone out of the window, I am sure if we were all advised that we need to renew our certificates in the first letter that was sent out rather than the very heavy handed "pay the fine you fraudster or you will be dammed for ever letter" and if we did not renew our certificates after the warning we would get fined, 99.9% of us would have done so straight away and none of us would have had the stress and worry which everyone on the forum seems to have had.