Recently a panel of doctors at the British Medical Association’s annual conference in Belfast voted “overwhelmingly” that it is “fundamentally racist” to require tourists to pay for their own medical care provided through the United Kingdom’s taxpayer paid for universal healthcare system. The BMA have been lobbying the Department of health to overhaul their laws to allow ANYONE traveling to the UK to have their healthcare provided at the expense of British taxpayers.
First, these are doctors, not economists, and it shows. The UK is not wealthy enough to pay for the medical care of the entire world. Their healthcare system provides decent health care to people who are paying into the system, but that system would completely break down if you have hundreds of thousands of people who do not pay into the system, pulling out of it. Let’s be clear, NO ONE is getting health care for free, the British citizens are paying for their healthcare with a huge part of their paychecks through taxes. It is only fair to require people who are visiting the country to pay for their treatment.
Keep in mind that the UK already has over 144,000 medical tourists each year who are being required to pay for medical services. How many more people would come here if medical care was free? By making medical care free you create the perverse incentive to travel to the UK even if you can afford medical care in their home countries.
Also this will affect the wait times for health care in addition to increasing the cost to UK taxpayers. Right now the UK has 409,000 people waiting more than 18 weeks to get treated. Wait times are one of the largest issues that plague socialized medical care systems like the NHS. This problem would be many times worse if promised free medical care to the world, or even just the members of the EU.
The Uk's universal healthcare system is already strained with not enough doctors, poor quality of service, and long wait times. Because of this more people are leaving the UK to seek medical care in other countries than are traveling to the Uk to take advantage of their NHS. If the HNS were offered for free to tourists the system would fail to provide effective service to anyone. That proposed policy would not provide MORE medical care. It would break the medical care already provided.
The BMA are completely out of touch, the majority of Brits don’t want their healthcare system to subsidize the healthcare of the entire world. That is not a racist argument, it is a practical argument. The BMA also doesn’t represent the majority of doctors in the UK. The majority of the BMA panel that voted to say that it was racist to ask people to pay for their medical care was only 500 doctors. Even if 500 was only a simply majority of the panel, that means that the maximum number of doctors on the panel is less than 1000 doctors. There are 290 thousand doctors in the UK. This panel represents less than one third of 1% of the doctors in the UK.
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