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posted by martyb on Friday November 25 2016, @01:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the make-foreigners-pay dept.

Patients could be forced to show their passports before being granted NHS [UK's National Health Service] care as part of a bid to crack down on foreign visitors, a senior official has said.

The Department of Health is examining whether patients should have to show two forms of ID to get some elements of NHS care, saying this was "controversial" but already happening in some places.

Chris Wormald, the most senior civil servant at the Department of Health, said in a hearing at the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) that the NHS has a "lot further to go" when it comes to reclaiming money from foreign visitors.

[...] "Now it is obviously quite a controversial thing to do to say to the entire population you now have to prove identity."

[...] But PAC chairwoman Meg Hillier expressed concern about British residents that don't have photo ID and those who would struggle to find a utility bill.

"I have constituents who have no photo IDs," she said.

"Because they have never travelled they have no passport, they have no driver's licence because they have never driven, they still live at home because they can't afford to move out so they've never had a utility bill in their name.

"(They are) perfectly entitled to health care - British born, British resident - how are you going to make sure that people have access easily to the National Health Service without having to go through a very humiliating and impossible to meet set of demands?"

Source: The Independent


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Webweasel on Friday November 25 2016, @03:00PM

    by Webweasel (567) on Friday November 25 2016, @03:00PM (#432853) Homepage Journal

    Right, because in the modern UK we get posted utility bills right?

    BZZZZ! WRONG!

    EVERYTHING is paperless. I have not had a bill of any kind in over 3 years now, EVERYTHING is paperless billing.

    So, will you accept the printed out email that I could have faked? Fuck no. Will my utility provider send me a paper bill? FUCK NO.

    Not everyone has a passport either. (Also, you need both. Photo ID and proof of address one is not enough)

    Nothing regarding this has been actually thought out by those in charge (who I bet, have private health care)

    This is classic divide and conquer by the Tory party. IMMIGANTS TERK MY JERB. I mean IMMIGANTS STOLE MY NHS.

    No, the tory party are destroying the NHS by trying to privatize it. But don't look at that! Look over here at the IMMIGANTS taking away your NHS, they are to blame.

    Divide and conquer. Just like Brexit, Just like Trump. Ignore the real problems while we fuck you because your too busy arguing about stupid shit that don't matter.

    --
    Priyom.org Number stations, Russian Military radio. "You are a bad, bad man. Do you have any other virtues?"-Runaway1956
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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Friday November 25 2016, @03:25PM

    by GreatAuntAnesthesia (3275) on Friday November 25 2016, @03:25PM (#432857) Journal

    > No, the tory party are destroying the NHS by trying to privatize it.

    Slight correction: The tories are trying to destroy the NHS IN ORDER to privatise it: They slash funding (while shuffling the figures and claiming to be investing), overwork the staff, attack their morale and impose all sorts of counter-productive bureaucracy until the level of service hits rock bottom. Then, when patients are stacked up in the corridors, babies are being born in car parks, burnt out junior doctors are operating on the wrong organs and underqualified, underpaid temporary HCAs on zero-hours contracts are inadvertently spreading infections and missing obs, the tories will use the tabloids to shout "LOOK! SOCIALISED HEALTHCARE DOESN'T WORK! PRIVATISE PRIVATISE PRIVATISE!" In this way, they hope to finally break the British public's long and deeply-held reverence of the NHS.

    The goal of privatisation, of course, is for ministers to sell off billions in publicly owned property and pocket as much of the proceeds as possible. The fact that their little get-richer-quick scheme causes fatality and medical crises in the population they ostensibly represent doesn't bother them in the least because, as parent poster points out above, they and their families have private healthcare so fuck the plebs.

    It's also worth noting that despite years of this kind of abuse, the NHS still provides a world class service with outstanding results. Not as good as it was, but I'd still take it over pretty much any other healthcare service you'd care to name. That is due almost entirely to the downtrodden but dedicated professionals on the coalface, the vast majority of whom deserve fucking medals. I am confident it will weather the current storm, and will eventually be restored to glory when a half-way sane government (Corbyn?) finally gets into power. It's just a shame we have to put up with this kind of crap in the meantime.

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Webweasel on Friday November 25 2016, @03:43PM

      by Webweasel (567) on Friday November 25 2016, @03:43PM (#432863) Homepage Journal

      It has survived this far, long may it continue.

      It's also worth noting that despite years of this kind of abuse, the NHS still provides a world class service with outstanding results.

      Considering the rise in demand, the service from the NHS is phenomenal. Compare to the demands in the 1980's to today I am stunned that the NHS has coped as well as it has.

      Why anyone would choose to go into Nursing in the current environment boggles me. It shows that John Nash's game theory is bullshit and that humans are altruistic. Praise to those people who choose that career.

      --
      Priyom.org Number stations, Russian Military radio. "You are a bad, bad man. Do you have any other virtues?"-Runaway1956
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 25 2016, @06:20PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 25 2016, @06:20PM (#432939)

        Why anyone would choose to go into Nursing in the current environment boggles me

        Job security? I does seem nursing is the saving grace for many ne'er-do-wells.

        I'm less impressed by the altruism of nurses, and more by their competency. It might be that the burnout rate is exceedingly high, so i see more of the worst.

        *20 years working as a nurse*

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 25 2016, @09:17PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 25 2016, @09:17PM (#432999)

        >Why anyone would choose to go into Nursing in the current environment boggles me. It shows that John Nash's game theory is bullshit and that humans are altruistic. Praise to those people who choose that career.

        I've always found these comments interesting as they are uttered by people through a series of rationalizations would never dream of proving Nash wrong by their own example.

        Maybe carry the load yourself a bit?

    • (Score: 1) by purple_cobra on Sunday November 27 2016, @06:53PM

      by purple_cobra (1435) on Sunday November 27 2016, @06:53PM (#433713)

      This wasn't meant to be a wall of text...

      As a tiny cog in the NHS machine, you have no idea how glad it makes me to see people say things like this!

      We get competing, mutually-exclusive targets, software written by actual chimps (may be only partially true), promotion purely on either the Peter Principle (seriously - head of information governance? A former nurse with no experience or qualifications in anything beyond nursing) or outright nepotism, the internal market and a whole host of other nonsensical shite which exists purely to waste time and taxpayers' money, but most of us actually want to see a sick person come in and that same person walk out the other side well again, or at least in a better state than when they came in. Management incompetence and a general lack of understanding of all the steps involved in getting the patient from referral to treatment - yes, we do have to find out what's wrong with them before cutting them open and taking bits out - puts incredible pressure on staff, causing morale to plummet. So we have the worst aspects of the public sector distilled and amplified repeatedly until the entire thing collapses in on itself. The devolved parts of the UK are in a marginally better state than England, but the Tories and their supporters will not allow that to continue unchecked.

      This is the reason social care is being defunded: it's not rocket science to work out that if there's no money to look after the elderly (or otherwise) in need of care when they're well enough to go home from hospital following admission, yet not recovered enough to be left to their own devices, then they stay in hospital to recover as the hospital gets penalised if they're readmitted within 30 days! Now add in the entitled arseholes who know their rights and pay their taxes so have no problem with shoving granny in the hospital with "chest pains" over the weekend so they can go on a night out or a weekend away which, by the way, is a far greater problem than this "health tourism" bollocks that the tabloids rant about, and you have a recipe for the destruction of the NHS. Write to your MP and demand they sort out the funding for health and social care or in 10 years or so there won't be an NHS. The number of elderly people is only going to increase and they are, in general, more prone to problems that will land them in hospital and then keep them there for a while, so the pressures we see now are only going to increase.

      And keep a close eye on Manchester. There's some decent ideas there, but the people most involved in making them work are rather too friendly with the likes of David Cameron and the other free-market-or-die muppets in government/elsewhere, so things might 'fail' to prove that public sector healthcare is useless.