£140m health tourist bill NHS hasn’t clawed back
NHS hospitals are owed an astonishing £ 139 million from health tourists who have failed to pay for their treatment in England alone.
And despite pledges to recoup more of the money, hospitals are getting worse at finding and forcing overseas patients to pay up.
A Mail on Sunday investigation can reveal that since April 2013, hospitals across England have recovered just £86 million out of £225 million billed to health tourists.
Our investigation, carried out using Freedom of Information laws, also revealed that:
The number of foreign visitors billed per year has almost doubled from about 12,000 in 2013/ 14 to 20,000 in 2016/17;
Despite more bills being sent out, it appears health tourists are increasingly not being pursued for full payment;
Collection rates have slumped from £45 for every £100 billed in 2013/14 to £35 per £100 in 2016/17.
Last night, Labour MP and chair of the Public Accounts Committee Meg Hillier said: ‘It’s simply not fair that the taxpayer should have to foot the bill for the treatment of overseas visitors who are not entitled to free hospital care.’
Many hospitals have been notoriously lax at billing at all, due to an attitude among some medics that it is not their job to ‘police’ those who use the health service. In 2011, it emerged that Nigerian Bimbo Ayelabola cost the NHS at least £145,000 after travelling to Britain to give birth to quintuplets.
The 38-year-old’s two boys and three girls were delivered by caesarean at Homerton Hospital, East London, where she needed neonatal care for several weeks. She has since returned to Lagos and claimed in 2015 that she had never been sent a bill by the NHS.
Homerton University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust said some of the bill has since been repaid but declined to say how much. A spokesman said ‘we have recently been in dialogue with the family’ about repaying the remaining amount.
Collection rates vary hugely between NHS trusts – with some large urban sites serving big immigrant populations sending out millions in bills but getting little back.
Together, two large London trusts, Barts Health and King’s College London, billed more than £50 million. King’s recovered £6.2 million of £22.2 million it billed, and Barts £9.4 million of £29.3 million owed.
And University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust recovered just ten per cent of the £ 4. 8 million it bill ed overseas patients between 2013 and 2017.
A spokesman for King’s said: ‘In cases where accounts remain unpaid, our legal representatives take financial recovery action.’
Barts Health NHS Trust said: ‘We make every effort to recover costs from patients who are not entitled to free NHS care, using hand-held card-readers to obtain funds from patients at their bedside.’
A University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust spokesman said: ‘Daily reports flag up patients who may be ineligible for NHS care to the overseas visitor manager who will in turn issue an invoice if ineligibility is confirmed.’
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesman said: ‘Last year, we introduced laws so that hospitals must charge overseas patients upfront and in full before non-urgent treatment takes place instead of chasing unpaid bills.’