Anyone can get very ill at any time.

This issue is also about recognising mutual obligations and responsibilities, and looking after all our futures.

Would you like to be a British citizen abroad in France and being refused treatment?

Nonetheless, the British media has been relentless in presenting the ‘dogwhistle’ politics of immigration, rather than having an open, honest or complete debate about the NHS privatisation enacted by this Government.

Jeremy Hunt MP says today:

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.

This current Government, it has been argued, has been extremely divisive, setting off able-bodied people against disabled citizens, employed people against unemployed, and so it goes on.

The ludicrous farce of this latest announcement, of cracking down on “health tourism”, is that similar announcements have been made before. In the meantime, Hunt has been forced to apologise for a tweet when faced with legal action, and there has been talk of an impending crisis in acute medicine.

Today’s announcement will again see Ministers facing renewed claims that GP surgeries are being turned into “border posts”.

In its three years in power the government has a poor record on announcing policies that sound good but prove to be completely unworkable
(shadow health minister Liz Kendall, previously)

The Chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners, Prof Clare Gerada, has previously warned that:

“GPs must not be a new ‘border agency’ in policing access to the NHS. While the health system must not be abused and we must bring an end to health tourism, it is important that we do not overestimate the problem and that GPs are not placed in the invidious position of being the new border agency.”

Today, the Department of Health is publishing the first comprehensive study of how widely migrants use the NHS. These independent findings show the major financial costs and disruption for staff which result from a system which will be substantially reformed in the interests of British taxpayers. Just because they are ‘independent’ findings does not necessarily mean they are very accurate, as any observer of the “output” of the OBR will tell you.

Previous estimates of the cost to the NHS have varied, but this latest attempt research reveals the cost may be significantly higher than all earlier figures.

To tackle this issue and deter abuse of the system, the #omnishambles Government is proposing the following now:-

• introducing a simpler registration process to help identify earlier those patients who should be charged.
• looking at new incentives so that hospitals report that they have treated someone from the EEA to enable the Government to recover the costs of care from their home country.
• introducing a new health surcharge in the Immigration Bill to generate income for the Government (but it is unlikely this money will go into frontline patient care, as indeed the £2.4bn “efficiency savings” have not been returned either);
• appointing Sir Keith Pearson as an independent adviser on visitor and migrant cost recovery;
• identifying a more efficient system of claiming back costs by establishing “a cost recovery unit”, headed by a Director of Cost Recovery;

Andy Burnham MP, Labour’s Shadow Health Secretary, responding to Jeremy Hunt’s announcement on overseas visitors’ and migrants’ use of the NHS, said:

We are in favour of improving the recovery of costs from people with no entitlement to NHS treatment. But it’s hard not to conclude that this announcement is more about spin than substance. The Government’s own report undermines their headline-grabbing figures, admitting they are based on old and incomplete data. Instead of grand-standing, the Government need to focus on delivering practical changes. Labour would not support changes that make doctors and nurses surrogate immigration officials.

For a video of Andy Burnham MP responding to this latest report, please go here.

Furthermore, it appears that what Hunt won’t say about migrants is that British expatriates might make much heavier use of the NHS than any other visitors (and accordingly they should pay.)

A recent report by the European Commission concluded that so-called benefits tourism was “neither widespread nor systematic”.

As for most countries, residency not nationality primarily determines eligibility for healthcare treatment.

With the Conservative Party finding themselves ‘squeezed’ by UKIP in the run-up to the European elections, this could provide an useful smokescreen for the disaster in acute care which the Conservatives have somehow single-handedly generated.

However, the “benefits tourism” narrative of the Conservatives and UKIP was dealt a heavy blow by the emergence of this information, which the BBC’s Norman Smith tweeted earlier last week:

Last week’s announcement by Jeremy Hunt on loneliness was panned in a widespread manner by many professionals.

Maybe for the Conservatives there is ‘no such thing as Society’ after all?

Overseas visitors and migrant use of the NHS: extent and costs