Racist dog-whistle and bogus statistics in the Mail’s ‘health tourism’ story

Digging up an old case for a cheap picture stunt recycles racial prejudice

 

In its delight in reporting that hospitals could ask to see patients’ passports before treatment, the Daily Mail has reached for its trusty dog-whistle.

The second page of its front page story today on the government’s plans has a picture of a black woman with her five newborn babies, who are quintuplets. The picture is of Bimbo Ayelabola, 33, who was born in Nigeria and came to Britain in 2011 to receive care during her pregnancy, at a cost of around £35,000 per child, according to the Mail.

If you were wondering why the newspaper has re-published a four-year-old story about a one-off and unusual case alongside its splash, you need only imagine what the Mail hopes its readers will think when they look at this picture: a foreigner, coming to this country, having several children at taxpayers’ expense.

In fact, the picture is of a piece with the story itself, as covered by several newspapers. For one thing, the government’s claim that so-called ‘health tourism’ costs the NHS £2 billion a year, is false.

Number-crunchers at the Guardian and Channel 4 went through the relevant Department of Health reports in 2013 and found the true cost to be more like £300 million at the most.

The £2 billion figure includes £1.4 billion for ‘non-permanent residents’ – that is, people who live, work and pay taxes here, and are entitled to free healthcare like everyone else – and £0.3 billion for ‘irregular migrants’, including failed asylum seekers, over-stayers and illegal migrants. The remaining estimate of £300 million is for people coming here specifically for healthcare – the so-called ‘health tourists’.

If you think grouping all these people together is a bit shady, you would be right. But the papers have repeated the £2 billion figure today anyway.

Racism

It’s a commonplace to say how much the NHS relies on foreign-born workers. But there is even some evidence that the service benefits financially from use by people from abroad. A 2013 study by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and York University found that hospitals received millions of pounds from private patients from outside the UK for treatment.

When you put the figures next to those of a recent Sunday Times report on the cost of unpaid treatment for ‘health tourists’ from 2010 to 2015, they paint a very different picture.

Great Ormond Street Hospital reported that 83 per cent of its private patient income in 2010/11 was not from UK patients – that’s over £20 million of a total £25 million. For Birmingham Children’s Hospital it was 88 per cent.

To take the Times’s top victim of health tourism, King’s College Hospital in London, over half of its private patient income was from non-UK patients – nearly £8 million in 2010/11 alone. That’s double the yearly average ‘cost’ to the NHS reported by the Times in unpaid bills. (In fact, it’s probably higher, as that’s the average for four years, and the Times figure includes the first months of 2015.)

The study adds that “medical tourists to the UK contribute around £219 million in additional ‘tourism spending’ to the UK economy per year” on hotels and other spending.

Aside from the obvious dangers of unfair application of the new passport check, with the DoH having to train staff so they don’t pick on people who ‘look foreign’, the policy itself is born of a xenophobic inflation of data for political ends. The 150 per cent charges for patients from outside Europe will likely scare away people with genuine health needs (as well as greatly increase the bill – and therefore the ‘cost’ – of unpaid fees), which one suspects is the desired outcome.

To address an often-heard refrain: no, it’s not necessarily racist to want to curb the abuse of public health services, whether by people here or from abroad. But the use of misleading data, outlying cases, and photos like this one to justify withholding medical treatment to ‘foreigners’, is much harder to absolve from the charge.

Adam Barnett is a staff writer at Left Foot Forward. Follow MediaWatch on Twitter

53 Responses to “Racist dog-whistle and bogus statistics in the Mail’s ‘health tourism’ story”

  1. Gerschwin

    So what’s your point? You don’t like the Mail? Go figure. The Guardian and Channel 4 have a whole load of stats that support left wing views on the NHS? Wow, do bears also shit in the woods? You’ve got a non story here. Although I am delighted the NHS does so well from private patients – more evidence we should abolish and privatise health care, nice to have you chaps on side.

  2. David Lindsay

    “One of the consequences of the universality of the British Health Service is the free treatment of foreign visitors. This has given rise to a great deal of criticism, most of it ill-informed and some of it deliberately mischievous. Why should people come to Britain and enjoy the benefits of the free Health Service when they do not subscribe to the national revenues? So the argument goes. No doubt a little of this objection is still based on the confusion about contributions to which I have referred. The fact is, of course, that visitors to Britain subscribe to the national revenues as soon as they start consuming certain commodities, drink and tobacco for example, and entertainment. They make no direct contribution to the cost of the Health Service any more than does a British citizen.

    “However, there are a number of more potent reasons why it would be unwise as well as mean to withhold the free service from the visitor to Britain. How do we distinguish a visitor from anybody else? Are British citizens to carry means of identification everywhere to prove that they are not visitors? For if the sheep are to be separated from the goats both must be classified. What began as an attempt to keep the Health Service for ourselves would end by being a nuisance to everybody. Happily, this is one of those occasions when generosity and convenience march together. The cost of looking after the visitor who falls ill cannot amount to more than a negligible fraction of £399,000,000, the total cost of the Health Service. It is not difficult to arrive at an approximate estimate. All we have to do is look up the number of visitors to Great Britain during one year and assume they would make the same use of the Health Service as a similar number of Britishers. Divide the total cost of the Service by the population and you get the answer. I had the estimate taken out and it amounted to about £200,000 a year.Obviously this is an overestimate because people who go for holidays are not likely to need a doctor’s attention as much as others. However, there it is. for what it is worth and you will see it does not justify the fuss that has been made about it.

    “The whole agitation has a nasty taste. Instead of rejoicing at the opportunity to practice a civilized principle, Conservatives have tried to exploit the most disreputable emotions in this among many other attempts to discredit socialized medicine.

    “Naturally when Britons go abroad they are incensed because they are not similarly treated if they need the attention of a doctor. But that also I am convinced will come when other nations follow our example and have health services of their own. When that happens we shall be able to work out schemes of reciprocity, and yet one more amenity will have been added to social intercourse. In the meantime let us keep in mind that, here, example is better than precept.”

    Aneurin Bevan, In Place of Fear: A Free Health Service, 1952

  3. Gerschwin

    So the Labour PIErty were duplicitous spendthrift charlatans even in 1952? Makes sense.

  4. David Lindsay

    Do you know which party was implementing all of this in 1952? Do you know who was Prime Minister?

  5. Gerschwin

    Churchill old boy. The author above I believe is Labour however. Do get a grip man.

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