The foreigners charging NHS for healthcare in own country
FOREIGNERS are billing the NHS for expensive healthcare they receive i n their own countries, a Daily Mail investigation can reveal.
Under an extraordinary legal loophole, migrants can 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 emergencies on holiday and entitle them to charge the NHS for the cost of any medical treatment they might urgently need within Europe.
But the NHS hands out more than five million free EHIC cards every year – and keeps no record of how many go to foreigners.
They are given 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 have to pay for – funded by the NHS.
Because the cards last for five years, they are worth a fortune to migrants with chronic 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 – obtained one of the cards after visiting the UK for less than a day.
Journalist Ani Horvath took it to hospitals in her native Hungary which confirmed she could 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 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 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 t ourism, ‘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.
One migrant who used the card wrote: ‘ 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.
MPs demanded an immediate crackdown.
Dr Sarah Wollaston, a GP and chairman of the health select committee, said: ‘This loophole will have to be rapidly closed because it has very serious implications for the NHS.’
The cost of health tourism to the NHS is unknown but a Government report in 2013 put it as high as £2billion a year.
Comment – Page 14
‘Serious implications’