John Mann MP reveals massive European health bill for UK

And by the way, I pay CSG on the half of my Top Up paid by my employer, and income taxe too. So it’s far from being a great gift

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FWIW Mann is probably right - it’s just that he used the wrong numbers to come up with the wrong answer. Conveniently that is a bigger number than reality. It’s also not exactly news.

I found the topic, including Mann’s figures discussed on FullFact.org - not sure how reliable this site is but it seems a sensible discussion.

Of note an impact assessment is linked which puts the cost of providing healthcare to EU workers around £340million (dwarfed by £1,070 million for non-EEA citizens) of which about £240 million is recoverable.

Also interesting is the suggestion that NHS trusts find it much simpler to bill the activity through the normal UK channels rather than incur the extra admin of chasing the EU for the money.

Finally I have been struggling to see the point that he is making - he is a Brexiteer so I presume this is supposed to be a “look how the EU is dragging us down” thing but really it just reveals the incompetence of the NHS - and by extension the UK government.

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It just follows the trend of displaying numbers hoping that Joe Public will jump to the wrong conclusion. Remember the bus?

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Oh yes.

Amusingly it is estimated that the loss of GDP caused currently by the shambles that is Brexit is about £350 million a week.

Couldn’t make it up.

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It is true that the Labour Party gets things spectacularly wrong and politicians of all types are likely to try to use fake news.

There are similarities between the UK system and the European systems. In the UK I had to pay tax on the private healthcare provided by my employer and National Insurance contributions (similar to the deductions in France). However the problem lies firmly with the NHS because they have no experience of charging for care because most things are free.

Well, NHS trusts are pretty experienced at charging for care - it’s just that they don’t charge the public but rather their commissioning groups (who hold the purse strings).

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What exactly is the point of your OP? Is it an anti Labour post? If the figures mean anything shouldn’t the Conservative party be held to account!

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It’s not so much fake news - more the lie with a grain of truth.

But like much Brexiteer propaganda the scale and, more importantly, cause of the problem are not as stated.

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The fact that the NHS pays out £674 millions in healthcare for UK citizens abroad each year but only receives £49 million in return has been highlighted by a Labour MP and needs further investigation.

Unfortunately the real question he should have asked is “Is the NHS recovering the costs for treatment of EU citizens in the UK?”

If John Mann had asked the right question, he might have embarrassed the conservative government into action.

The new Minister for Health is keen to bring the NHS IT systemsinto the 21st century .
This badly needs doing but the track record is appalling.
There is no national system for UK ex pats receiving elective treatment on the NHS, it is all down to individual Trusts.
I think that the disjointed system is responsible for this lack of collection of the cost of healthcare for the citizens of other countries.

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John Mann is a dreadful old labour blowhard. He always asks the wrong questions, believes in the existence of paedophile rings in high places , satanic child abuse in North Nottinghamshire and to the great disadvantage of any peace process in the Middle East is a leading light in Labour Friends of Israel.

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@Ken_Barker

The outcry over the Jamaican man refused treatment was because he was a long time English resident and tax payer. He is not a migrant, visitor or former resident but a bona fide UK resident entitled to NHS services, so not sure what relevance his story has to this debate?

It depends on what point he was seeking to make and how he followed it up - I see that the question was asked, and answered in Feb 2016 (hence my “it isn’t news” comment).

Unfortunately I can’t quite work out where he was going with this - if he was predominantly EU bashing “isn’t it terrible that the EU charges us all this money for healthcare but we get none back for the care we give them” then he essentially pulled some random figures out of a hat which looked, superficially at least, like they supported his argument but on scrutiny just underline the fact that the NHS is quite bad at this aspect of its financial management. It is only a small part of its budget though.

I hope that I have demonstrated that there is no reason to suppose that healthcare demand is reciprocal in this matter, nor any reason to suppose that healthcare costs are trivially comparable in the UK and EU.

If he was NHS/Government basing then he does have something of a point but, in using the wrong figures he (conveniently) makes it look as though the problem is larger than it really is. More importantly why stop at the EU deficit - the non-EU deficit looks to be significantly larger. Taken together they certainly amount to something the NHS should improve upon but it is still a small part of its total budget1.

If I had the energy (but I probably do not) I would have a look through Hansard to see what happened next. However, ultimately, I suspect this was just a general parliamentary points scoring thing.

1] Just over 1% if you combine the EU and non-EU figures. Mind you that would pay for all of the cancer drugs used by the NHS.

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Agreed it was only an illustration of how slowly the NHS reacts

I think the EHIC issue is a red herring to be honest. A UK citizen with an EHIC isn’t required to show it when demanding treatment (in France) because the treatment is not provided free at the point of delivery. The requirement for the EHIC comes later when the person receiving the treatment wishes to recover whatever cost is determined as appropriate from his/her home health service (NHS in the case of a UK citizen).
The real underlying problem lies, as has been already said/assumed in this thread, in that the NHS provides treatment ‘free’ at the point of delivery. That in my view is the fundamental flaw in the system.
The NHS is crap at recharging for services (consider the number of non EU citizens having expensive treatment in the UK which is never charged out - medical tourism as it is defined).
Just like the ID card issue, this will never be resolved until the UK drops the notion that healthcare is free.
It is not. It has to be paid for in one way or another and how it copes with the requirement is no doubt the subject of a whole new debate.
But, debate it, it must!
The NHS is bursting at the seams; I understand well the essential principles of the 1947 NHS act and at the time, it was the thing to do but time has moved on and clinging on to those notions is not for a modern society intent on properly looking after the health of its population.

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Graham Lees - excellent summary!

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As one of these UK govt. pensioners who paid tax and NI all my working life , and now continue to pay considerable UK tax , I wrote some years ago to the then UK pensions minister , asking if as an early retiree I would be entitled to an E121 (S1) , He replied that as UK health care was based on residency anyone legally entering the country was entitled to free membership of the NHS; whereas , as french health care was based on a contributory system ,I would have to pay for cover until I reached UK retirement age. (This was before the introduction of the CMU -now PUMA), so an expensive full private insurance was the only, and inferior, option.
I would think that , should the present S1 system collapse, a fair solution would be to give the option to have NI taken from govt. pensioners and introduce a reciprocal arrangement for them similar to the present S1.

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I don’t see this happening as AFAIK the S1 is not actually tied to the UKs membership of the EU and thus should be unaffected by Brexit (if it happens).

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@parsnips I can’t remember when it stopped but pre-about 2014 you could get an S1 as an early retiree based on your NI contributions? I think for a maximum of 3 years tho’. OH had one for a while. I couldn’t as was self employed and exempt from NI so just paid the cotisations for (then) CMU.

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I don’t know about other countries, but doesn’t this graph illustrate a big reason why such a difference in what UK pays out to France and what it gets? The bulk of the french nationals resident in the U.K. are are working and paying NI, so no need to claim money from France for them.

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