NHS charges for foreigners are racist nonsense.

Charging in the nhs is racist. It implies that the nhs is 'failing' because of health tourism - in other words, foreigners. But foreigners help to run the NHS and look after you and your family. It's actually the rich who are destroying it, because rich people don't want poor people to have free healthcare.This is what we call Class War.

'Health tourism' makes up no more than 0.3% of the nhs budget, a smaller amount per year than we were promised for the nhs from Brexit per week.

The single largest cost is emigrant brits (they come back for hip operations). The cost of recuperation of this money is likely to make the actual process more cost than its worth:

According to FOIs sent by DocsNotCops to all foundation trusts in England, in 2015, a third of trusts spent more on the staffing and administration costs of implementing charging than they actually recouped. This is despite the fact that migrants are charged at 150% of NHS fees, supposedly in order to compensate for admin costs.

At the same time PFI debts are costing £2billion a year and will cost nearly £300billion by the time they're done. As usual we find elites taking public money while pointing the finger at foreigners.

However, all this besides, introducing a culture of passport checks is extremely problematic. It brings the border police into the nhs. People in uncertain status no longer can trust to go to hospital, when the government's own report states that it is unlikely to be able to recoup any money from these people. It creates bureaucracy (hardly something we need more of). Currently the overseas officer scans the patient lists and tries to identify names that sound foreign to go and investigate - a racist process - or staff report patients they suspect to be foreign - a racist mentality. It shifts the focus of treatment from need (what do I have to do for this patient) to cost (what can I afford to do). It prevents public health as you cannot take measures that would stop future problems as it only permits urgent care.

On top of this shit show, migrant laborers disproportionately pay taxes and disproportionately work in the nhs. We make up 12% of NHS staff, a third of all doctors, (by the way, this has been the case since at least the 60s, when 30-40% of junior doctors came from only India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka) and since 2001 more than half of all nurses. The UK deliberately hires nurses from abroad to avoid the costs and infrastructure of training their own while undermining them with the cuts to nursing bursary and the cost of tuition fees as well as the pay cap.

This country uses foreigners to prop up a gutted nhs and then blames foreigners for the problems. That's. Fucking. Racist.


See also:
http://patientsnotpassports.co.uk/
https://fullfact.org/health/health-tourists-how-much-do-they-cost-and-who-pays/