Government must enforce identity checks on those taking advantage of OUR health service
The overused NHS must start turning away foreign health tourists exploiting its free medical care
THE £2billion blown each year treating foreign health tourists with no right to free NHS care is a sickening scandal.
It is also indicative of a service seen worldwide as a soft touch.
Among these patients are thousands of pregnant women who turn up to have their babies, including 900 at a single South London hospital last year.
In fact an incredible 19 out of 20 patients in a random sample of those referred there for ANY reason had no right to free treatment.
The NHS turns no one away — but only a fraction of the costs legally due are recovered. That is nuts.
The Government is dead right to want checks on IDs, passports or other proof patients are eligible for free care.
If not, they must be charged upfront.
Unions baulk at medics acting as “border guards”. OK, but the NHS also has an army of administrators.
Their attitude to public money must toughen up.
Bleeding hearts will hate such a clampdown. But they are the first to complain about the NHS being starved of funds. They cannot have it both ways.
Once the freeloaders realise they’ll have to pay in full, they’ll stop coming.
Dig for victory
CONGRATULATIONS to pro-Brexit JCB tycoon Anthony Bamford for abandoning the obsessive europhiles at the CBI.
More firms confident in Britain’s future should do likewise.
Again and again the business group has been on the wrong side of history, predicting disaster if we kept the Pound, then campaigning to Remain.
Now it is part of the battle to secure a “soft” Brexit which will change nothing. Even Project Fear, the Treasury’s wild pre-referendum forecasts of financial apocalypse, has been revived.
Its effect is self-fulfilling. The more gloom it stokes, the lower the Pound falls.
The backbone of UK industry is not the tiny percentage of companies exporting to Europe. It’s all the small firms who don’t and are looking forward to ridding themselves of costly EU red tape.
Why doesn’t the CBI speak for them, instead of trumpeting propaganda for its paymasters in Brussels?
Cell phones
NOTHING illustrates the shambles in our prisons better than the epidemic of illicit mobile phones.
Gangsters use them to trade drugs and guns and even plot murders beyond the walls. Others pose for selfies and post them on Facebook like anyone outside.
These mobiles have proved absurdly hard to prevent. So it’s good that new technology is to be trialled that jams the signal and renders them useless.
Prison is about punishment and rehabilitation. Not social media fun — or running a criminal empire from a cell.