Middle England’s £623 MILLION bailout for NHS

Families forced into debt to pay for vital surgery as waiting list hits 4 million

BRITAIN’S hard-pressed middle class is being forced to plunder savings and rack up huge debts to pay a staggering £623 million for vital operations that NHS hospitals are struggling to perform.

Record numbers of patients are shelling out up to £15,000 a time, after being told they must wait many months for treatment despite being in extreme pain, according to a hard-hitting report.

They are cashing in ISAs and pensions, taking out loans, borrowing from families and friends, and ‘maxing out’ credit cards to fund treatment they should have had sooner on the NHS, say experts.

According to the report by medical industry experts UK Private Healthcare, patients are now forking out £623 million a year for treatment. The shocking increase in ‘pay-as-you-go’ operations is being fuelled by rapidly lengthening NHS waiting times and ‘cruel’ rationing of vital operations such as hip and knee replacements.

More than four million people are currently waiting for NHS surgery – the highest figure since 2007.

In some cases, patients have chosen to pay for treatment themselves because they believe waiting on the NHS would prove fatal.

Pierre Bütikofer, 65, paid £7,000 for prostate cancer surgery as he feared he faced waiting months on the NHS.

Noreen Stainwright forked out £5,500 because her NHS hospital failed to perform her gall bladder removal within six months of an ‘urgent’ referral. Her surgeon said it could have burst at any time – with deadly results.

Meanwhile, local health authorities, called Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), have been stealthily raising the bar for access to common operations such as hip and knee replacements, and cataract removals, to save money.

In places with longer waiting lists, the report discovered that demand for self- pay surgery is greater. It forecasts that such spending on essential healthcare will balloon to almost £1 billion a year by 2020, as the NHS struggles to meet demand.

Last night, Liberal Democrat Health spokesman Norman Lamb said: ‘ We all pay in to the NHS through our taxes on the assump- tion that care will be there when we need it. But increasingly that is not the case. It is unacceptable that people are having to pay for their own essential operations, usually out of desperation. They are having to pay twice.

‘The fact that many thousands of patients are now paying for their own essential operations is mask-

‘This is unsympathetic and frankly cruel’

ing the scale of the problem in the NHS.’

Leaked forecasts predict waiting lists will rise to 5.5 million by 2019. The number forced to wait at least six months has almost tripled since 2013, from 45,000 to 126,000.

Surgeon Anand Nanu, president of the British Orthopaedic Association, said CCGs now routinely denied hip and knee replacements to patients on the basis of their weight or because they smoked. They have also raised pain and immobility thresholds. In January, three West Midlands CCGs said patients would not get hip or knee operations unless their pain stopped them sleeping or carrying out daily tasks.

Mr Nanu added: ‘This boils down to saving money. We feel very strongly that this is affecting our patients. It is unsympathetic and, frankly, fairly cruel.’

NHS England said: ‘It is no surprise that a report from a firm that profits from helping private healthcare companies grow their business should assert that patients should pay for their own care.’