Unlike the growing trend of British citizens travelling abroad for medical treatment which they pay for privately or via their health insurance policies, a confidential internal report estimates the cost of treating patients from outside the European Union amounts to at least £62 million a year, according to The Times.
This figure is “bound to be an underestimate” as new rules that are supposed to prevent foreign patients abusing the NHS are being ignored, according to the report.
The NHS is obligated to treat anyone who requires urgent medical care. Patients from outside the EU are supposed to prove that they can pay for medical treatment in advance.
But a survey has discovered that NHS managers aren’t guaranteeing that patients prove their eligibility for free health care. The survey also suggests that only around half the debts are being chased, costing UK taxpayers more than £30 million a year. Only part of the £62 million is paid back by the patients.
The problem persists, despite the Government promising a crack-down on unpaid bills in 2004. Hospitals were told to make patients pay for their treatment if they were not residents in Britain or from countries with reciprocal arrangements. The Health Minister at the time, John Hutton, said in April 2004: “I expect trusts to make enforcement of the regulations part of their core business.”
Ministers have repeatedly said that statistics are not collected on the amount of patients being treated who are not entitled to free care and have frequently refused to state how much health tourism costs the NHS.
An internal investigation estimated the scale of the abuse after the new regulations were introduced. In September the Department of Health lost an 18-month struggle to stifle the findings of an internal report when they were revealed to Conservative MP Ben Wallace under the Freedom of Information Act.
As well as the first official estimates, the document also revealed that maternity and HIV services were being demanded the most. “Maternity . . . was frequently mentioned as an issue,” the report states. At the time, officials even suggested that the Government should contact air-lines to ask them to stop heavily pregnant women from Nigeria, India and Pakistan flying in to the UK.
According to the Telegraph, the largest single unsettled bill was for the treatment of a newborn baby, between December 2005 and March this year, at University Hospitals of Leicester. The care given to the child, which included four months in intensive care, cost the taxpayer £208,259.
Treatment for HIV was also “widely recognised to be a problem area” as many health workers were “hostile” to the idea of making foreign patients pay for their treatment. In one hospital, Department of Health officials discovered that the person responsible for checking patient’s eligibility “was not welcome” in the HIV ward.
In September, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health said that it refused to accept the conclusions of its own report, according to the Times. She claimed that the investigation was based on a sample of just 12 trusts. She added that the “situation is much better than it was three years ago” but admitted that figures could not be produced to prove it.
She also said: “We are in the middle of a review with the Home Office, which is looking at tightening up enforcement of the regulations.”
MP Ben Wallace, who exposed the report, told The Times: “This Government is conniving at a ‘Don’t ask, don’t charge and don’t chase’ policy that is leaving the NHS wide open to abuse.”