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.
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
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53 Responses to “Racist dog-whistle and bogus statistics in the Mail’s ‘health tourism’ story”
David Lindsay
Quite.
And the NHS was in all three manifestos in 1945. It would have happened anyway. The Right’s hostility towards it since the 1980s is a denial of your own history.
Cole
Actually, the Tories voted against setting up the NHS. They’ve always hated it.
Cole
Have you actually read the article? Do you have anything to say about the inaccurate government figures? Or how they are mindlessly repeated by the Tory press? Do you know the difference between facts and opinions – or are facts a kind of silly left wing thing?
Gerschwin
Sure you’ll try and correct me but pretty sure Big W actually tried to kick it into the long grass with some sort of committee which then, and to his fury, quickly gave the NHS its seal of approval-thus we are shackled to its mangy corpse to this day.
damon
Dog whistles are for dogs. So this article is viewing much of the British people as dogs.
The 300 million figure may well be bogus, as it depends on what questions you ask and how you classify foreigners. We have 30,000 African born HIV sufferers just as one group.
But hardly any will be included in the health tourist figures as they will have probably gained citizenship or asylum somewhere along the lines. Claiming that they can’t live in Zimbabwe for example because it’s too dangerous. When I’ve just watched Unreported World on Channel 4 which showed brave political activists managing to live well enough there and not needing to ask for asylum elsewhere.
How did so many African people get to be living in England? Does anyone know? You can’t just decide you want to live in England, any more than I can just move to the USA or Australia. I can’t.