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
53 Responses to “Racist dog-whistle and bogus statistics in the Mail’s ‘health tourism’ story”
David Lindsay
They didn’t win the popular vote. Labour did. But they had never been against the principle. It wasn’t initially a Labour idea, either. But both main parties adopted it pretty much as soon as it had been proposed. All three parties offered Beveridge and Keynes nominations in 1945, but both stuck with the Liberals, so neither got in, and they had to be given peerages instead.
Leon Wolfeson
Hm? I said and meant “populist”.
If the Tories hadn’t accepted the NHS, council houses, etc. they wouldn’t have won that *election*. Pretty mainstream view there!
David Lindsay
It wasn’t a matter of “accepting”. They had never been against the NHS, and they were pioneers of council housing, which was quite a paternalistic Tory idea, and which was duly favoured by paternalistic Tories. In those days, they took it for granted that they could run major local authorities, and that whoever did so could pretty much do as they liked with that authority. Accordingly, they were massive builders of council housing, something that they carried up to national level.
Leon Wolfeson
I appear to be rolling my eyes.
David Lindsay
You just need to read a book.