HEALTH TOURISM SCANDAL
Foreign mums in £16m NHS rip-off
WOMEN who flock to Britain to give birth for free could be cheating the NHS out of £16million a year.
At least 2,631 ineligible foreigners had their babies delivered on maternity wards last year, leaving the cash-strapped NHS out of pocket, figures reveal. In the past 12 months, cases have risen by more than a fifth from 2,167. But the actual figure could be much
higher. The abuse comes despite NHS trusts now having a legal responsibility to recover charges from health tourists.
Birth tourism is part of a wider scandal that sees tens of thousands of people arrive here for treatment from countries already receiving millions of pounds in UK foreign aid. It costs the NHS up to £2billion a year.
Alex Wild, from the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: “Taxpayers cannot afford to run an international health service.” New rules require hospitals to charge overseas visitors upfront for non-urgent care.
Staff have been told to routinely ask patients where they have lived in the past six months to identify who is entitled to free NHS treatment.
The idea was to see whether checking identification reduces demand on services. Results are currently being evaluated. Just 84 English NHS trusts providing maternity care responded to a request for information about charging – around two in three.
The bill for the 2,631 ineligible women was £10million. But the true figure could be closer to 4,500 women a year at a cost of £16million.
The largest single unpaid maternity bill in 2016/17 was at the Royal Berkshire NHS Trust, where a mother from Pakistan owes £46,000. Managers are trying to find 329 women to recoup care costs totalling £317,000. The biggest NHS trust, Barts in London, is tracing 438 mothers for a combined unpaid bill of £1.75million.
Other health tourism abuses include the treatment of cancer, infertility, HIV and renal failure.
The NHS has quadrupled the cash recovered from health tourists since 2012/13 from £89million to £358million last year. Health Minister James O’Shaughnessy said: “Hospitals must make sure they charge people if they aren’t eligible for free care.
“They are getting better at identifying those people.”
Last year the Daily Express revealed how a Nigerian mother named Priscilla, who received fertility treatment at home, arrived in the UK to have quadruplets and ran up an estimated £500,000 NHS bill. Nigeria received £230million in UK foreign aid in 2016.
Former cancer surgeon Meirion Thomas said: “The burden would ease if we could either charge the nation for the cost of treating these people out of its foreign aid gift or make the Government change the rules.”
Mr Thomas, now a private consultant surgeon at The Lister Hospital, west London, has backed our Stop The Foreign Aid Madness crusade which demands the Government reallocates some of the £13.4billion sent overseas to easing problems at home.
WHEN the National Health Service was founded in 1948, the idea was that it would provide medical care for the people in this country who would in return pay for it through taxation and national insurance. It was not founded to provide medical care for the rest of the world. And yet that is what has been happening: record numbers of ineligible women have been having their babies using the NHS, leaving a bill of at least £10million – which the British taxpayer is forced to pay.
This is turning into a major scandal. While the vast majority of people would feel sympathy for mothers-to-be in a country without proper medical welfare, we simply cannot afford to take on the problems of everyone else and throw money at them – we have enough of our own. And given the inordinate amount we already spend on foreign aid, could it not be said that we have done our bit in that respect without dragging in the NHS?
The National Health Service is just that – national, not international. We are frequently being told that it requires ever more funding but if scandals such as this are the reason it is running short of money then the hospitals involved must do more to ensure they are treating the right people. And they are the people who are actually paying for the service, namely those resident in the UK.