May pressured NHS to release data to track immigration offenders | UK news | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/201 ... -offenders

She is one dumb arsehole.

What does she even mean by 'release'. The trusts have the data and they use it to attempt to recover the money. Who else needs to know the address of someone from, I dunno, Canada who happens to have fallen ill while in the UK? What, so they can be 'investigated' by our notably professional, compassionate and even handed press?

That story on the front page today about the woman who racked up a massive bill. It's actually made me really, genuinely angry. They said she came to the UK to give birth and it's costing us £500K

1) The bill so far is \apparently only about £120K as reported by the relevant trust when asked. Yes, that's still a lot of money, but since when are the press allowed to just make numbers up?
2) She was emigrating to the US, but there was a problem with her visa - which she had applied for at great time and expense, so it's probably a legitimate intention - when she got there and she had to return home. She was on her way BACK to Nigeria - booked on a flight, luggage already loaded - and fell critically ill during the stop over of the connection at Heathrow airport. What are we supposed to do, leave a pregnant woman and her unborn children to die on the floor of terminal 3? What the actual [LIFTED] is that supposed to say about us?
3) So maybe she hasn't got a big lump of cash to pay up, maybe she does. Does anyone with an single ounce of decency think the right thing to do after she's woken up in intensive care in a country she knows nothing of and nobody in and has been told that she gave birth to multiple children but that some of them are already dead and she never even got to see them - is to shove a credit card terminal under her nose?

No. Not in my name, not 'for my country', not on any given day. We are a civilised nation and we do not deal in this sort of callous barbarity. No nation who would do such a thing deserves an iota of respect. Someone complaining about this particular situation is not worthy of consideration as an actual human being, they are some form of corrupted, cancerous mollusc who should be burned off our national hull with a blowtorch, never to be seen again.

There most likely are people who take advantage of the fact we will treat them first and ask questions later. I don't doubt it, and that's wrong and we need to minimise it as much as we can. But in choosing this particular example to complain about, those doing so have not so much lost the moral high ground as detonated a large amount of dynamite where the moral high ground used to be, creating a crater visible from the moon.

anybody coming to the UK without medical insurance should not be allowed to travel to the UK. they should be refused travel at the point of departure. no medical insurance no right of travel or entry to the UK for what ever reason ...

You're a proper charmer aren't you?

Many countries have a reciprocal agreement.

When I was living in the UK and working in Frankfurt, I was taken ill (mono) and was treated by a doctor and blood tests were made at the hospital. This was all invoiced back to the UK, I didn't need to hand over a single Cent.

having a reciprocal agreement is medical insurance is it not ...

thank you i didnt think that you had noticed.

if the abuse of our NHS continues it will fast track privatisation within the NHS. if you cant see that then you will reap what you have sown.
i dont wish to see the NHS privatised and one way of stopping that is to ensure the NHS is not abused by those who pay nothing into it but wish to you its services for free by travelling to the UK because they cant get treatment in the own country. hence the requirement for medical insurance, be that private insurance for the individual or by reciprocal agreement between countries, for anybody trying to travel to the UK ...

That's utter garbage. Yes, there is a cost to the NHS to treating patients from overseas but it's not the major threat to the health service in terms of privatisation - that would be the Tories and, quite frankly UKIP.
Actual health tourism, that is people coming here deliberately for free treatment, is estimate at between £110m and £280m per annum (clickey), that's against a total budget for the NHS of ~£116bn or between 0.1 and 0.25% of the budget.
People from foreign countries who happen to be treated while in the UK do cost more - estimated at ~£1.8bn (~1.6% of the NHS budget). Of that £1.8bn the amount that should be recoverable is ~£500m (clickey).

So yes, there is a cost to treating foreign visitors to the NHS but the actual cost is relatively small in terms of the overall budget. We already recover some of those costs, for example through the EU EHIC system (which leaving the EU will actually make harder to do).
So the question is how much would it cost to implement a system to check that EVERYONE has the means to pay for their NHS treatment against what we currently have. Administering a system to check the eligibility of everyone using the service every time they use it and recovering the cost from insurers would be a significant cost. And incidentally, once that system is in place, you've actually made it a lot easier to privatise the NHS because you've just put the payment mechanism in place.

that is why the NHS is not having money problems then. oh well carry on spending NHS money on those that contribute nothing to the NHS but are willing to pay to travel here and abuse the NHS and we will see how long the NHS stands up or more likely falls down. hello to the newly privatised NHS you will ensure that happens. while you are at it please change the name of the NHS to WHS as that it seems is what you want.

myself if you dont pay for something then you cant have this something. thats life ...

ps. the example stated above. the person was refused entry to the US because she didnt have the finances to cover the medical costs. how fortunate she travelled to the UK had an emergency just after getting to the UK and would you adam and eve it we provide free medical care along with accommodation which we are paying for. such a fortunate set of circumstances that seem to happen regularly from certain parts of the world because they cant afford the medical care there. they are so lucky we do at our expense. it has to stop ...

It's called not being a complete [LIFTED] to our fellow human beings, and a little word called compassion. If 50% of all NHS funding was going on health tourism, you might have a point, but it's such an insignificantly small amount of the NHS budget as to be an irrelevance frankly.

But so long as you have another excuse to keep the darkies out, you carry right on, regardless of the cost to all involved.

Exactly where did I say the NHS didn't have money problems?
The financial problems faced by the NHS have very very little to do with the cost of providing, mainly emergency, treatment to non-UK nationals. The main financial strains are caused by an ageing population, the increasing cost of more complex medications (both as a result of improving understanding of diseases and treating conditions associated with old age and obesity), and last but not least, real terms cuts to the budget (whatever [LIFTED] the Tories try to claim).

The current Health Secretary is credited (along with Douglas Carswell, you know, the UKIP MP and others) with writing a sodding book on how to privatise the NHS for Gods sake and you think a major threat to the NHS is health tourism?

have these non UK nationals paid into the system via NI or tax ?
do they have medical insurance to cover any treatment if treatment is required?

if no then they should not have treatment at our the UKs taxpayers expense.

the threat comes from funding or under-funding. the greater the abuse of the NHS that drains funds from it the quicker that book becomes reality ...

Funding in the NHS has always been a problem. The Govt just makes it worse. I would have said Tories but Labour was just as complicit. Allowing PFI and private companies to take over NHS contracts is what has allowed privatisation. Changing GP contract so patients were registered to a practice rather than a doctor was designed to allow private companies to take over GP surgeries.

The current rules now allow anyone to walk in to a GP surgery, register as a patient and obtain an NHS number. You don't even need proof of address (otherwise this discriminates against travellers and the homeless). You don't need proof that you live here, only that you intend to stay in the UK for more than six months. Again, this was all introduced by the Govt.

Funding - as a % of GDP of UK, the Govt spend was around 6%. Tony Blair then increased that to 8.5% to match the EU at the time. What happened? Waiting times came down, and outcomes improved. It should have gone up to 10% for 2015-16, as it did for the EU. It went down to 6.6% for 2016. Hospitals have closed. There are fewer beds in hospitals, fewer staff, so fewer resources to treat an ageing population. Again, this isn't something immigrants have done. It's what the Govt has done.

GP appts - can't speak for hospitals but certainly in our patch, there has been no net change in population. The number of black and ethnic minorities is the same. But demand for appointments has gone up by 50%. People are getting older with more health problems, not fewer as originally envisaged. In fact, we have patients who go abroad for six months of the year to Spain. Technically, they are no longer eligible for NHS treatment but we can't prove it. They come back over to collect their repeat prescriptions and bugger off again.

That's OK, thanks to Brexit they'll be spending 100% of their time in the UK, along with all their recurring medical issues. Won't that be lovely.

thats why i am saying the system needs changing, ID cards for prove of residence. put a stop to medical tourism using medical insurance as a requirement and by saving these costs it will help the NHS budget. use overseas aid for social care to free up bed blocking and when we leave the EU extra funding should be available. i am sure there are other ways but this is the easiest route. there are enough NHS managers and admin to ensure this is enforced but it needs the will and the law to back it ...