Illegal immigrants could put our healthcare in jeopardy

It happens so often as we approach the terminal stage of the political cycle. Governments acquire a death wish.

They flounder from one foolish decision to another. Call it foot-in-mouth disease. Or simple bloody-mindedness. Knowing the grim reaper of election day is near, it is as if they throw caution to the wind, having decided they have nothing (more) to lose.

How else can one explain the incredible decision, just announced, that ‘failed’ asylum seekers — illegal immigrants to you and me — are to have free health care on the NHS? No doubt it could be regarded as a decision of estimable moral enlightenment: but only if the said NHS (a) had the capacity available to treat the extra patients; and (b) was caring adequately already for the sick citizens of the UK who pay for it.

Regrettably, while I am the first to stress — with gratitude — that the NHS and its dedicated staff selflessly work wonders, the Service fulfils neither condition. We well know why. The demand facing the NHS is infinite; its waiting lists self-perpetuating; every life saved at 65 is another candidate for even more advanced care at 70. It treats a million patients every 36 hours; deals with 2,000 diseases; is the biggest employer in Europe. The amount spent on it recently doubled within a five-year span.

So the Service struggles, gobbling up immense amounts of money, its structures periodically — and often wastefully — re-shaped by ministers desperate to control its appetite while improving its product. We know the problems. Look nearby, across the border. They are the same: closed wards, cancelled operations, children's dental services withdrawn, a ban on recruitment.

While in the UK there was the dithering over the banned cancer drugs, some routinely available through public health systems across Europe and shown to be up to five times more effective than NHS treatments, but refused to patients here — unless they went private and bought them.

There was the rationing of drugs for AMD — age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of blindness in the elderly. One drug, callously, was on offer only to patients with both eyes affected. Another was rejected out of hand. Until the hubhub grew so loud that NICE, the authorising body, had to announce a review.

Meantime, would-be patients must wait seven weeks on average for a hospital bed. (It was only six weeks when Tony Blair took over in 1997.) At any one time up to half of all the NHS trusts are in the red. Mrs A, mother of two sons, was 53 and suffering from bowel cancer. But the drug she needed to reduce her tumour to the stage where she could undergo an operation was refused. If she had not been able to raise the £21,000 necessary, she would have been sent home to die. Cancer survival rates in the UK are worse than in France and Germany. It is all a matter of diagnostic cancer scans, time to first treatment and getting the patient into radiotherapy and the latest anti-cancer drugs: in other words — money.

It is into this situation of unfulfilled need that ministers have elected — quite gratuitously — to add a new load to the NHS which, according to those who know (Migration Watch) gives the green light for up to one million illegal immigrants to obtain its services free. No wonder the nasty war between the police and illegals seeking entry to the UK, which constantly flares up outside the French port of Calais, has been touching new depths.

I was through there the other day, unmolested. But other travellers driving to the port have been stopped by migrant gangs in a chain across the road and robbed at knifepoint. To ask why they are there is to beg the question, why do they not seek asylum on the spot — in France? Or Germany? Or Belgium? Or Holland?

I think we know why. And so does the Mayor of Calais, Natacha Bouchart. She blames the nastiness on what she termed the enormous state handouts our Government offers to illegals. Indirectly, she said, it is costing her local economy millions of euros.

In the land of Alice, or Peter Pan and Wendy, British generosity to its swarming army of illegal immigrants could be reckoned quite estimable. But where does it stop? Could we extend our beneficence? Health “tourism” already costs the NHS millions, where “tourists” arrive from abroad and check in for treatment. Perhaps the NHS should have a few posters in New York travel shops?

If the nation had the cash and the resources to satisfy the needs of its own people, all this would be different. But it does not. The Germans have 20 intensive care beds for every 100,000 citizens; we have three. It is the lowest ratio in Western Europe. If you have a stroke, those misssing beds could cost you your life.

Accordingly, ministers have a case to answer for every one of its citizens, patients of the NHS, who die and whose lives could have been saved had the more sophisticated care they deserved — and had paid for — not been denied them.

Belfast Telegraph, 29.07.09