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Passport Control To Be Introduced At YOUR Hospital
Hospitals will soon demand that patients show their passport before they receive NHS treatment in a bid to crack down on so called ‘Health Tourists’.
The bill has already been tested in some hospitals including one in South London, where expectant mothers had to show residency papers else they were referred to the Home Office and faced with potential deportation.
The proposal is highly controversial for numerous reasons:
Not Everyone Has A Passport
You have broken your leg and crawled to hospital. Yet you have no ID with you, if the staff at the hospital can’t prove that you’re a UK national then you won’t be treated. OK that seems kind of extreme, but with the rules that will be applied who's to say that an incident like this won’t happen?
Govt now requires anyone attending hospital to prove eligibility for treatment to produce a passport. But not everyone has a passport!
— Jeremy Beecham (@JeremyBeecham) November 22, 2016
Show passport to access hospital treatment? ~120,000 undocumented children in the UK will be placed at extreme risk https://t.co/buC7y9RF2j
— MigrantChildren CCLC (@MigrantChildren) November 22, 2016
NHS Staff Are Not Border Control Staff
Hospital staff have a job to do, they need to make sure that their patients are nursed back to health. Issues such as proof of address seem well… distracting. Let alone the moral dilemma of turning patients away because they can’t prove their nationality.
I am not border control and neither are my colleagues. We don't need more red tape and marginalisation. https://t.co/jcNNwFVR3c
— Dr Alex Gates (@dr_alex_gates) November 22, 2016
Would It Even Work?
Does this mean that foreign nationals living in the UK will have to fly back home in order to receive medical treatment? A passport doesn’t prove residency, what about UK nationals who have been living abroad for 10 years? Would they be eligible for treatment, unlike a foreign national who has been living in the UK for 10 years?
#AutumnStatement this wk. How many of your Brexit promises will you deliver on Johnson, Fox, Davis, Patel, Farage? £350 mn / wk for the NHS?
— Tom Brake MP (@thomasbrake) November 20, 2016
During the Brexit debate the NHS was famously promised £350 million of funding a week by the Leave camp. This promise appears to be broken when looking at the introduction of new legislation such as this.
