Charging migrants to use the NHS is unethical – Labour should say so

It’s been a busy news week in Westminster – with the furore over David Cameron’s cabinet reshuffle, the extremely worrying and invasive Data Retention and Investigative Powers Act (DRIP) passing through Parliament, today’s debate in the House of Lords over the Assisted Dying Bill debate and the tragic Malaysian Airlines crash. But, whenever there’s this much going on in UK politics, we should take a moment to think about what we’ve missed.

One of the pieces of news that’s received little attention this week is the government’s plan to make non-EU migrants pay up to one-and-a-half times the cost of their NHS treatment.

In some ways, it might be for the best that media outlets haven’t given this issue much air-time. If this story had taken off it would have most likely resulted in political commentators conjuring up the tired stereotypes of migrants as ‘health tourists’ who are to  blame for the NHS’s failures. Sadly, it’s not exactly fashionable to defend migrants’  rights.

Yet it’s also thoroughly depressing that this new discriminatory rule has passed us by without so much as a whimper of protest. Arguably, that’s because the rules are already unfair. As it stands, non-EU migrants who aren’t permanent residents of the UK are already expected to pay 100% of their NHS bill after they’ve been treated. This is, in itself, wrong. But this new law makes the outlook even bleaker; non-EU migrants who are legally in the UK for longer than 6 months – either to work or study –  will have to  pay up to 150% for health services.  And if hospital fail to collect this money, then they’ll have to pay a fine.

Doesn’t sound like the best way to improve the NHS, does it?

Either way, forcing hospitals to shake down non-EU migrants for the money they owe under these new rules isn’t ethical. Most of the people who’ll be effected already pay for the NHS through their taxes; there should be no question over whether they’re entitled to the same free health care as the rest of us.

Maybe we should also remind health secretary, Jeremy Hunt that it’s migrants, not just British citizens, who keep our NHS going. The statistics speak for themselves: 11% of all NHS staff aren’t British (although this figure does include EU migrants), while 14% of professionally qualified clinical staff and 26% of doctors are from abroad.

These charges – which are based on the idea that migrants are a drain on the NHS – reinforce the false idea that so-called ‘health tourism’ is a major problem in the UK. In reality, as the think tank Class found, only 0.1% of NHS spending is lost in this way.  Migrants aren’t to blame for the problems in the NHS. As the Tories record on the NHS proves political mismanagement and too much bureaucracy are. Economic shortfalls won’t be solved in this way.

Although we might have all been distracted by Cameron’s not-so-radical cabinet changes this week, we should urge the Labour leadership to say that they’d reverse this rule, and call for them clearly outline why to the public. Access to health care in the UK – or anywhere else in the world – shouldn’t be incumbent upon where in the world you happened to be born or whether you can afford to pay for it,  and as the NHS is Labour’s big drive this summer, they shouldn’t hold back from saying so.