UK crackdown on ‘health tourism’
pharmafile | July 4, 2013 | News story | Sales and Marketing | Hunt, NHS, doctors
The UK health secretary has unveiled new plans aimed at reducing the cost of providing care to immigrants on the NHS.
The government’s new consultation will look at options to ensure that non-European Economic Area (EEA) migrants pay towards the cost of their healthcare.
Currently, short-term migrants coming to the UK, to study or work for more than six months, are likely to qualify for free hospital care as soon as they arrive.
Plans in the consultation include a ‘health levy’ on migrants from outside the EEA staying for up to five years of at least £200 a year – unless they have private health cover.
But the government said treatment for infectious diseases and sexually transmitted infections such as HIV would remain free for all.
Health secretary Jeremy Hunt said the government needed to: “Ensure that those residing or visiting the UK are contributing to the system in the same way as British taxpayers and ensure we do as much as possible to target illegal migration”.
He added: “We have been clear that we are a national health service not an international health service and I am determined to wipe out abuse in the system.”
The immigration minister Mark Harper said: “The NHS is one of our greatest assets but its resources are currently used to treat people who have made little or no contribution towards it – or who are not entitled to free care at all. This is unfair to UK taxpayers and impossible to defend in the current economic conditions.”
The cost of health tourism is hard to pin down, but the Department of Health estimates it is around £30 million per year. The budget for the health service is £109 billion for 2013.
But the chair of the Royal College of GPs, Dr Clare Gerada, said this amount of money was negligible, and was the equivalent of just two hours of the NHS’s annual spending.
She also voiced concerns that GP surgeries would become ‘border agencies’. “My first duty is to my patient – I don’t ask where they’re from or whether they’ve got a credit card or whether they can pay,” she told the BBC.
Many doctors see this week’s crackdown on health tourism as a distraction from the bigger financial problems facing the NHS, such as the need to find and deliver £20 billion worth of savings between 2009 and 2015 and a mere 0.1% increase in the NHS budget for each year of this Parliament.
The plans also form part of a wider debate on immigration within the UK, with the coalition government – led by the Conservative party – aiming to reduce the overall level of immigration to the UK, whilst also offering a potential referendum on its membership of the European Union.
Ben Adams
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