Melanie Johnson asked her civil servants to estimate the costs of extending the proposed scheme to cover people who were coinfected, those who had cleared Hepatitis C following treatment, and dependants. Richard Gutowski recommended that those who were coinfected and those who had cleared Hepatitis C be made eligible but that extending the scheme to dependants "would at least double the cost of the scheme and remains unaffordable within the existing budgets of all the four Health Departments."