Health tourists must pay for their NHS treatment

UNPAID bills totalling more than £60million have been racked up since 2010 by health tourists coming to Britain for free treatment.

NHS nurse in hospitalGETTY

The NHS is not a charity open to everyone in the world

People who come here from overseas and use the health service should be charged but all too often they are being allowed to get away with never actually paying.

The NHS may be free at the point of delivery but it is not a charity enterprise that is open to anybody from anywhere in the world to come here and use.

We pay towards the health service on the understanding that it is there for us when we need it, not so it can be exploited by people from overseas who do not contribute to the system.

Successive governments’ commitment to an open-door policy on immigration has driven up the population and put a great deal of strain on all public services, not least the NHS.

Failing to chase up health tourists and make them pay for their treatment will encourage even more people to come here and milk the system.

At a time when some Britons already struggle to see a GP or access timely hospital treatment this is simply unacceptable.

Politicians have often tried to downplay the true extent of health tourism so they can avoid confronting the effects of opening Britain’s borders on public services.

But they cannot ensure that the NHS operates sustainably unless they acknowledge the true scale of this problem and prevent people receiving free treatment to which they are not entitled. 

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End anti-Semitic abuse

Michael Douglas has revealed that his son Dylan, aged just 14, was subjected to anti-Semitic abuse while on holiday in Southern Europe.

Anti-Semitism is a growing scourge across Europe which incorporates not only verbal insults such as those hurled at Dylan but even horrifying acts of physical violence.

This is a terrible state of affairs and there can be absolutely no justification for anti-Semitism in any form.

Mr Douglas should be commended for speaking out.

Doing so has focused attention on the issue and his conclusions – that anti-Semitism must be confronted wherever it is found and forcefully denounced – are correct. 

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Taking pleasure in rain

Research merging weather data from the Met Office with information from the Household Panel Survey reveals that while we may grumble about the rain the weather makes no significant difference to our mood.

Given the notoriously poor state of the British weather this is probably just as well. 

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