NHS patients from outside the EU are to be charged 150% of the cost of treatment in the NHS.
This is part of a ‘crackdown’ on what is being cynically called ‘health tourism’ by the UK coalition regime. It wants to make big profits out of providing NHS care as it privatises it out of existence!
This latest move by Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt is to force NHS Trusts to make profits out of providing treatment at the point of need for foreign workers in the UK.
Presumably those that cannot pay will be turned away without receiving any treatment at all. It also means that would-be NHS patients will have to provide doctors with proof of their nationality and their entitlement to have free NHS care before they receive treatment!
As well as providing healthcare, NHS staff will have to act as Home Office immigration officers.
Hunt believes that these plans to charge for treatment could earn the NHS £500m a year!
Additionally, Hunt also wants to charge EU patients 125% of the normal cost of treatment. Obviously, this will affect all UK citizens that fall ill while they are in other EU states, but that does not bother Hunt in the slightest!
It will also mean that before people receive free treatment at the point of need in the UK, passports, or other forms of identity proof, will have to be produced.
Those hospitals that fail to bill foreign patients are to face fines, and it is expected that repeat offenders could face other sanctions, even closure.
Hunt said yesterday: ‘These plans will help recoup up to £500m a year, making sure the NHS is better resourced and more sustainable at a time when doctors and nurses on the front line are working very hard.’
The new measures are expected to come into force by next spring and follows on from the plan to charge migrants a £200 ‘NHS’ levy when they apply for a visa.
However, the scheme is part of the coalition plan for privatising the entire NHS. This is continuing apace.
Yesterday, Chancellor Osborne unveiled a plan for a £353m Private Finance Initiative hospital, to be built in the West Midlands. The 670-bed Midland Metropolitan Hospital is to be built in Smethwick.
It will replace large parts of Sandwell Hospital and City Hospital in Winson Green, and will earn the banks that put up the £353m, up to £1bn in profits over 30 years.
Trust chief executive Toby Lewis said: ‘Our commitment. . . is to develop more community-based services at our sites in Rowley Regis, at Leasowes and on Dudley Road’, while the accident and emergency departments at both City and Sandwell hospitals are to close.
Once again, private investors will make hundreds of millions in profits from the PFI scheme while two A&E departments are to be closed.
At the same time as private investors are looking forward to hundreds of millions of profits, NHS data obtained by the BBC under the Freedom of Information Act showed 62 trusts out of 121 respondents temporarily closed maternity units in 2013.
The 62 trusts identified represented 51% of those that responded to the BBC Freedom of Information request. Some 12% had closed their units 10 times or more.
The NHS is being cut, A&Es and maternity units are being closed and NHS charges are to be introduced. Privatisation is taking place at a frantic pace.
This is despite the fact that the BMA and RCN annual conferences rejected all NHS charges and also rejected the use of the PFI to provide private investors with huge profits out of the NHS.
The Tories are driving forward the privatisation of the NHS as part of a society of super-rich and super-poor.
The High Pay Centre has just produced statistics that prove this point. These show that executive pay has grown from 60 times that of the average worker to almost 180 times since the 1990s.
This is the situation that the September TUC Congress must tackle. It must be made to call an indefinite general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers government and socialism. This is the only way forward.