satriales wrote:I think the idea behind a small charge if you're not here for long is to stop people coming here just to have a free operation and then returning home. I know someone from Canada who did that, although I always thought Canada already had free healthcare so I'm not sure why they needed to.
Whether health tourism is actually a big issue that we need to fix or not, I don't know. But I don't think it's racist to oppose it.
It's part of the 'hostile environment' and directly leads to cases like Slyvester Marshall and Taitusi Ratucaucau, a foreign born army veteran, being told to pay tens of thousands of pounds for cancer treatment. Health tourism such as you describe is the tiniest of wedges within a wider health tourism cost.
Based on
rough estimates, the cost of treatment for people who deliberately arrive in this country to have NHS treatment via A&E was £60-80m in 2013. The cost of those who have registered with a GP but don't live here all the time (including British born residents who live overseas) was estimated to be £50-200m.
The cost of people simply having to visit A&E and other services while they're on holiday or working here for a short time is something like £1.8b.
Altogether that is 2% of the annual NHS budget for 2013, with the very deliberate, tabloid headline spawning cases of health tourism equating to 0.09% of it. The question simply should be: does it matter?
Does it matter enough to set up surcharge schemes that are already in place from the first Cameron/Clegg government, and add to the cost of moving and living here, to add an extra workload to NHS staff in chasing for immigration papers, and to result in the hardship for those specific cases mentioned above?
And if that thin wedge does matter on principal over the others, why does it? What is it about a relatively inconsequential number of foreigners travelling for treatment that means it requires a very disproportionate response to combat it?
