FOREIGNERS CHARGE NHS FOR CARE IN THEIR OWN COUNTRY
Exclusive: Health tourism loophole exposed
FOREIGNERS are billing the NHS for expensive healthcare they receive in their own countries, a Daily Mail investigation can reveal. Using an extraordinary legal loophole, migrants are able to charge the full cost of medical treatment in their home countries to the UK, even if they have never paid a penny of tax in Britain.
They do this by obtaining European Health Insurance Cards from the NHS. The cards were intended for British people to use in cases of emergency while on holiday and entitle
them to charge the NHS for the cost of any medical treatment they might urgently need while overseas within Europe.
But the NHS is handing out more than five million of these EHIC cards for free every year – and keeping no record of how many are being given to foreigners.
The cards are given out freely to any EU citizens who say they are living in the UK, even if they have not actually worked or paid any tax here.
As a result, Eastern Europeans can obtain the cards, then return to their home countries and use them to have medical treatment they would usually have to pay for funded by the NHS.
And because the cards last for five years, they are worth a fortune to migrants with ongoing conditions, or who have multiple pregnancies and births.
In an undercover investigation, an Eastern European woman working for the Mail – who has never lived or paid taxes in Britain – was able to get one of the cards after visiting the UK for less than a day.
Journalist Ani Horvath took it to clinics and hospitals in her native Hungary which confirmed she could use it to get maternity care and even skin treatments paid for by the UK taxpayer.
When she asked maternity clinic staff how many Hungarian women had registered for appointments covered by the NHS, she was told: ‘A lot of people. More and more.’
Using the card, she could have registered for a consultation with an optometrist costing a potential £150, or one with a dermatologist for £130 – or even antenatal and birth/ maternity care for one pregnancy at £ 9,500, or even a £47,000 liver transplant.
British ministers last night vowed to urgently review the use of EHIC cards.
Health minister Alistair Burt said it was ‘completely unacceptable that people living outside the UK think they can abuse our NHS’.
He said that as a result of the Mail’s investigation, the Government would ‘urgently carry out more work’ to crack down on health tourism, ‘including EHIC applications’.
In online forums, Romanians, Poles, Lithuanians and Slovakians can be found boasting of how they have managed to charge the UK for a range of superficial health treatments in their home countries.
They joke about how easy the fiddle is because the NHS pays and ‘ no one even blinks’. Expectant mothers admitted using the ploy to give birth in their home countries at the UK’s expense.
One migrant who had used the card wrote: ‘Through the card, all necessary arrangements to do with the pregnancy
‘Britain is a soft touch’
and childbirth will be made free.’ Another said: ‘No one even blinked. Everything was solved with the EHIC card.’
The NHS has spent more than £721million reimbursing other European countries for treating people with EHIC cards over the past five years.
But the Department of Health admitted last night it had no idea how much of that money had been claimed by foreigners using UK EHIC cards to get treatments in their own countries.
MPs said the practice was ‘ludicrous’ and demanded an immediate crackdown.
Tory Andrew Percy, who sits on the health select committee, said: ‘ This is a complete outrage. It is another example of how soft touch Britain has become the International Health Service. The NHS is there for British citizens who have paid in.’
Dr Sarah Wollaston, a GP and chairman of the health select committee, said: ‘ You should not be offering EHIC cards to overseas citizens. This loophole will have to be rapidly closed because it has very seri- ous implications for the NHS.’ Peter Bone, Conservative MP for Wellingborough, said: ‘For the price of a return easyJet flight, people across Europe can get free health cover for five years. It is a ludicrous lack of rigour by the NHS.’
Joyce Robins, from campaign group Patient Concern, said patients who were being refused routine treatments on the NHS because of lack of money would be appalled. ‘It is disgraceful and it has got to be stopped,’ she added.
Campaigner Julie Bailey, founder of Cure The NHS, said: ‘Those responsible must close this loophole immediately, stopping our valuable NHS resources being used on those who are not entitled.’
The true cost of health tourism to the NHS is unknown but a Government-commissioned report in 2013 put it as high as £2billion a year. Experts say even this is an underestimate as the vast majority of overseas patients are never identified by hospitals, let alone made to pay for their treatment.
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