‘Health tourists’ cost hospitals £100k every day

Hospitals have seen almost £200million drained from their budgets in the past five years by “health tourists”, despite official pledges to crack down.

Figures show despite measures to get more money from foreigners who fly in to take advantage of the NHS, they are losing out to the tune of more than £100,000 every day.

Some hospital trusts are millions of pounds out of pocket for care they gave to people not entitled to free treatment.

Last year binned bad debts claims amounted to £36.5million – up 21 per cent in four years.

But experts think the published total is just the tip of the iceberg as it only represents cases where invoices were generated and not paid. In many cases officials would not have issued a bill because they realised there was never any prospect of receiving remuneration.

In 2017, NHS trusts were supposed to start charging patients upfront for the cost of their care, so administrators didn’t have the time-consuming job of chasing them.

Patients needing emergency care were still to be invoiced later. The Government said its charging scheme should net an extra £500million for the NHS but a National Audit Office report said the money raised would fall far short of that target.

The top five hospitals with the biggest outstanding bills in the past five years are: Barts Health Trust, London, £35.3million; King’s College Hospital Trust, London, £17.8million; Lewisham and Greenwich Trust, London, £11.1million; Guy’s and St Thomas’ Trust, London, £9.5million and Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals Trust £8.4million. The issue of foreign patients being unable to pay for their care was highlighted in a BBC documentary called Hospital, in which a Nigerian woman was treated as an emergency case at St Mary’s A&E, in London, after her plane stopped at Heathrow.

The woman, only identified at Priscilla, needed care for her unborn quadruplets and by the time she was discharged her bill had reached £330,000.

In the Conservative Party’s 2019 election manifesto it stated: “We will clamp down on health tourism, ensuring those from overseas who use NHS services pay their fair share.

“And we will increase the NHS surcharge paid by those from overseas.” Alp Mehmet, chairman of Migration Watch UK, said: “Foreigners taking advantage of the NHS has long been a problem. Let’s hope Keir Starmer and Health Secretary Wes Streeting have the courage to tackle the flagrant abuse of what seems to regarded as the International Health Service.”

A Department of Health spokesperson said: “We want to ensure overseas visitors contribute towards their treatment costs, as our health service is a residency-based ­system. We expect all NHS trusts to recover any charges not paid.”