25.01.12
Covering costs
Providing free care and treatment for patients outside of the EU is costing the NHS at a time when there is scarcely enough funding to care for the people living in this country.
However, the obstacles to claiming this money back may pose too large a problem, leading some trusts to simply let it go as a write-down. If patients leave the country, this can complicate the process of recovering the costs.
Offering free care to those who need emergency treatment is part of the brilliance of the NHS, but this huge loss of money demonstrates that it may be being taken advantage of.
The variation evident in the amount of debt written off across different trusts suggests that reclaiming this money is not impossible, and it depends more upon the particular trust rather than the inherent difficulty of securing payment.
Therefore more can and must be done to ensure the NHS recuperates this money to continue to provide quality service to all who need it.
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