This is very good Sunny.

“They will introduce stricter charging or a requirement for non-EEA temporary migrants ”

Hmm.

“Then Jeremy Hunt goes on Radio 4?s World at One and says: “I don’t want to speculate, but we have heard… it’s £200m””

So this is about non-EEA temp migrants then? Is it?

“pointed to a figure of around £10-£20 million which health service fails to recoup from countries within EEA whose nationals are treated in UK.”

And that’s for EEA migrants, is it?

I’m not sure that I can think of any reason at all why those two numbers should be even vaguely connected let along the same.

Speaking on the Daily Politics, a member of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, stated that people “coming from outside the UK, and especially people coming from outside the European Union, are significantly less likely than British nationals, and people born here, to claim benefits”.

She added that the issue of “people coming from outside the UK in order to sponge off our health service may be a problem, and we should certainly deal with abuse, but the figures tell us that they impose rather small costs on the health service”.

Worstall – feel free to tell us what the figures are about then.

Sunny, please, don’t go all prickly and defensive on us. I’m working purely from the information that you yourself have presented us with. And you seem to have made an error by conflating EEA and non-EEA. I’ve simply pointed that out.

I can’t help feeling that the only NHS source likely to be able to corrobrate Hunt’s figure is his proctologist.

“And you seem to have made an error by conflating EEA and non-EEA.”

I think that may be an assumption on your part. Unless there is some reason to believe that EEA and non-EEA nationals diffr substantially in their use of the NHS then surely the one figure may give us a useful idea of what the other might be.

Beware this stuff about restricting the rights of non nationals. It also works against British people too as they are not allowed to discriminate in that way.
I’m an Irish citizen but was refused the dole in Ireland a few years ago because I didn’t pass the habitual residency test. I had lived and worked in Ireland in the past, but not in the previous two years.
They had to do it like that because it was illegal to favour their own citizens. It sucked I thought, as I wanted to live there but the economy had few jobs.

seems to have come down from £200m to £20m to £7m in a couple of hours.
Idiotic Hunt making stuff up as he goes along. Is this Plan B? Lie your way out,,,?

‘Lie your way out’.. PlanB?.. I think it is plan A. From the top down all we seem to get is lies.

Sunny,
You can’t accuse someone of plucking figures out of thin air by cherry-picking quotes. Hunt may be being dishonest, but you definitely are.

To paraphrase what he said on the radio:

1) The official figure is 20 million approx, however,
2) If a hospital patient is recorded as a UK resident the NHS pays for the treatment received, but if recorded as non-resident, then the hospital has to attempt to retrieve the cost. This produces an incentive to record non-residents as residents.
3) The true cost is not known, but 200 million has been suggested. It may be more, or very much less.

The incentive issue is a valid point, even if 200 million is still a pretty small % of the overall budget.

Wouldn’t this be just easily solved by making the NHS see ID at the GP? Of course, anyone injured in accidents etc would be treated in exactly the same way, but refuse those who are illegal or who haven’t paid a few years subscriptions (Tax)?

PMI for those who come here to work temporarily, and to cover those who haven’t yet paid their “subs”, funding a boom for private insurance?

Surely this is a national insurance based system, and I know of no system of insurance which doesn’t require a premium. There are obvious exceptions like the disabled, and those born here already (if we can’t privatise then we will be looking after the unemployed, but we surely don’t have a responsibility to look after the unemployed of the rest of the world, do we?)

I would go for a domicile or residency check at point of use. The vast majority of non EUSSR migrants come from countries where healthcare is private so in the main they should be used to paying to see a doctor.

@Dislecksick

This is an article written by an NHS consultant of 30 years plus standing in the Spectator recently.

He deals with most of your queries regarding ineligible patients getting round the necessary criteria.

I know a couple of doctors who work in hospitals near Heathrow and it is common knowledge that there is plenty of abuse of the system and the NHS staffs’ good nature (and which never gets recorded).

However, whether this abuse actually amounts to any significant sum in an NHS that costs £140bn a year is another matter altogether.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/8847831/the-next-nhs-scandal/

There’s at least one flat-out lie in Merion-Thomas’s piece: children of people who aren’t UK citizens or permanent (ILTR) residents are not eligible for British citizenship from being born in the UK. Haven’t been since 1983.

Since that’s pretty much the only testable assertion made in the piece (everything else is “I met a man” stuff), that’s a pretty strong indicator that the whole thing is lying paranoid bigoted nonsense.

13 – Cor, falsus in uno; falsus in omnibus. Old school.

Tim: not exactly. If he’d said a whole bunch of things that I knew to be correct, I’d assume the one falsehood was an honest mistake (although it’s a very basic piece of information which I’m struggling to see how anyone could be an informed commentator on migration and not know).

Shinsei1967

The NHS budget is £108.9 billion for this year, but don’t let that stop you from emulating the Tories and “plucking figures out of the air”.

http://www.nhs.uk/NHSEngland/thenhs/about/Pages/overview.aspx