Posted on 08/27/2019 4:34:19 PM PDT by Oshkalaboomboom
Overseas patients have left the NHS with more than £150million in unpaid bills for treatment, a Daily Mail investigation reveals.
The cash could pay for 6,000 nurses, 22,000 heart bypasses or nearly 5,500 junior doctors.
Two hospitals in London are owed £28million each, including almost £500,000 from one patient alone.
The revelation comes amid a new-found reluctance among frontline staff to chase payments, with doctors' leaders saying their obligation to charge overseas patients is 'racist' and deters vulnerable groups from seeking help.
But Tory MP Philip Davies said: 'It is the National Health Service, not an international health service and it is essential these charges are made for overseas visitors.'
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
About a month ago Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon escorted a pregnant Mexican illegal over the border so she could get hospital treatment. I don't know if she ended up giving birth but at the very least the taxpayers ended up footing the bill for a lady who was only there because she felt our laws didn't apply to her. If she did give birth that makes things worse because now we're stuck with an anchor baby on top of the medical bills.
Anyway, during the discussion of Sen. Wyden's stunt I mentioned that tourists who are trying to come here legally and are close to due date are turned away. The lady mentioned in the Daily Mail article, Priscilla, was one of our success stories as she got turned away here and ended up leeching off of the British government instead. What the Daily Mail article doesn't mention is that Priscilla was advised by her Nigerian doctor that her birth was going to be too complicated for them to handle so she headed to the Promised Land with no money just looking for freebies. Kudos to the TSA agents who turned her away.
So wait a minute.......
If it’s national health care, free for all, then why are they being charged?
Isn’t the point of national health care for FREE health care?
Those that survive the NHS that is.
It's free for all resident citizens, i.e., they have to Be UK citizens and living in the UK. My wife is a British National, born and raised there, raised a family there, worked there, even qualified for a government pension like our Social Security but when she moved to America to live with me the NHS dropped her. She would go to visit her children and grandchildren for 1 month per year and she had to buy travel insurance in case she got sick while she was over there.
The US should be so diligent.
>>’It is the National Health Service, not an international health service’
there’s never such a thing as only a little bit of Socialism.
I know FReepers love to bash the NHS and point out horror stories about incompetence, bad medical care, etc., but in reality it is pretty much the same in the USA: the quality of care you get depends on where you live and how much money you have. In America if you live in a nice middle class area odds are you're going to get good medical care. If you live in an urban shithole you're probably going to get urban shithole medical care to go along with it. It was so common they even made a hit TV show about it, St. Elsewhere. When I lived in Georgia they were arresting orderlies in Atlanta who were stealing the jewelry off of dying accident victims who were brought into the emergency room at Grady Memorial.
My wife was brought up under the NHS as were all of her family members, her children, her grandchildren, etc. None of them has had a bad experience. Her mother and her Aunt both had hip replacements with little wait. They just happened to live in the right area.
All I’ve read so far with them are the horror stories about people being sent home with a pill or something then dying of sepsis or a bowl blockage because they complained of stomach pains - several kids over the past month died from stupid diagnosis’ - Daily Mail.
The plan is working out so well in Britain that our Rat Party wants to do the very same thing.
People wait for months for heart surgery in Britain. People wait,at most,a few days here.People wait weeks to see an Oncologist (a cancer specialist) in Britain.People wait a day or two here.People sometimes wait a year for a hip replacement in Britain. I waited a few days for *both* of mine.
I could go on.
And BTW...the very same thing that happens in Britain happens in Canada as well.
I agree.
London here I come!
Those that survive the NHS that is.
A friend took a position with a bank in London among the many perks, was not having to purchase health care.
Until his new mates said, “what are you nuts?”
Yes, he purchased private health insurance.
And in America more people die from infections they picked up in medical settings, infections that they didn't have when they went in, than die from car crashes and homicides combined. Here is the data from the CDC if you want to read about it and yet I'm sure you feel perfectly safe going to your local doctor, just as my wife and every one of her relatives do or did when they visit their doctors in England. My wife lives with me so she doesn't go to doctors in England any more.
Years ago a routine chest x-ray revealed a spot on my lung. The doctor’s office called me immediately on a Saturday and booked me in for Monday. I got a CT scan on Monday and a PET scan two weeks later.
I’ll bet patients in Canada and England have generally different experiences from mine.
No, we don’t. In my case the CT scan happened the same day (although it was a weekday!)
Thank you for a rare and refreshing touch of realism here about the NHS. It’s a little more complicated than living in the right area, but your broad point is correct. I’m in a similar situation as your wife - I’ve been an NHS patient for all my (longish) life (in fact I’m just a year or two older than the NHS) in many different parts of the country, and have had a range of serious health problems throughout my life: but with one exception I’ve never received anything but excellent care (the one exception was when I broke my nose playing cricket at 14). But I’m not naive enough to suppose that my experience is universal.
There’s plenty of room in the NHS for both excellence and its opposite. The central problem of the NHS is that it’s too large (world’s second or third largets civilian employer, depending on how you count) to be managed consistently.
Oshkalaboomboom, what you said about medical care in America varying greatly depending on region is 100% correct. It can even vary from a few miles.
When we lived in Europe, our medical care was usually provided at a large US hospital at Landstuhl Germany, or at base clinics at Ramstein Air Base. Both were excellent. As I was on flight status, my entire family also had flight surgeon care available to them, which was remarkable.
When one of my daughters, who was only about 7 years old at the time, had to have some surgery, we were referred to a German medical facility in the local area. The surgery was not major, but still an overnight stay. I wasn't sure to expect, but my wife and I were thrilled at the care. The staff were incredible. The German doctor had graduated from both John Hopkins in the US and University of Göttingen. He spoke perfect English, and his meetings with us were not rushed. He even took time to get to know our family better. Pre-op, post-op, and operation care was the best I have ever experienced. The facility staff had excellent food, and even fed my wife a wonderful meal while she stayed overnight.
Back in the U.S. just a few years later and out of the military, we moved into a very nice house in a good neighborhood. However, the medical care clinics that served as the satellites for the larger hospitals in the area that we were using (near our home) were awful. There were adjacent neighborhoods that were going "downhill", and illegal immigrant populations were increasing.
Then, crime started to hit our lovely neighborhood, and then the schools became dangerous for our children. Incidents of bullying by ethnic gangs became commonplace, and the school would not even acknowledge the problem. One of our friends child was attacked, and we put our house on the market the next week.
We moved into a richer area, and an even nicer, more expensive home. Our medical insurance provider was the same, but we used either an urgent care clinic or family clinic in that town, or the excellent hospital just down the road.
The difference was night and day.
We have family in other parts of the country, and their emergency rooms have actually had to shut down because illegal immigrants have bankrupted the facilities.
My wife is in England as I write this, taking advantage of one of the last flights of Flybe into Norwich. They are discontinuing service to that airport in October so after that the nearest airport to her family would be Stanstead, more than double the time it takes to get their home than Norwich. If, God forbid, anything should happen to her while she is visiting I have no doubt that she would receive excellent care from the NHS, just like she and her relatives always have.
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