22.10.13
NHS is ‘not an international health service’ – Hunt
Charging overseas visitors and ‘health tourists’ could save the NHS £500m, health secretary Jeremy Hunt has announced.
The DH has published a study of migrant use of the NHS which suggests £388m is spent each year on patients who should be paying for their care. Currently only around 16% of these costs are recovered.
Relatives of British residents and migrants who come to the UK to try to get free healthcare – a phenomenon known as health tourism – cost the NHS between £70m and £300m, the study states.
To tackle these costs, the Government is introducing a new ‘health surcharge’ as part of the Immigration Bill. Students will pay £150 a year and other temporary migrants will pay £200. The move will affect approximately 490,000 applicants.
Other measures include appointing an independent adviser on visitor and migrant cost recovery, establishing a cost recovery unit, looking at incentives for hospitals to report examples of treatment that should be charged, and introducing a simpler registration process to identify who should pay for their care.
Hunt said: “Having a universal health service free at the point of use rightly makes us the envy of the world, but we must make sure the system is fair to the hardworking British taxpayers who fund it. We have one of the most generous systems in the world when it comes to health care for foreign visitors, but it’s time for action to ensure the NHS is a national health service – not an international one.
“With the NHS already under pressure from an ageing population, it cannot be right that large amounts of taxpayers’ money is being lost through treating people who should be paying from foreign countries.
“These independent reports prove this is a serious problem that the Government was right to address. We are confident our new measures will make the NHS fairer and more sustainable for the British families and taxpayers it was set up to serve.”
The BMA has questioned the accuracy of the figures, and GP committee member Dr Chaand Nagpaul, said it was an “exaggeration” to suggest £500m could be raised. He said: “It did not include, for example, the costs of implementing such a scheme. The other issue is, of course, one of the main proposals is to charge a levy of £200 for migrants, and it could be, for example, that migrants, once they pay it, are more likely to use the NHS, almost feeling they want to get their money’s worth. And in fact the cost of a single extra outpatient appointment at hospital would be more expensive than the £200 saved.”
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(Image of Jeremy Hunt copyright Department of Health)