Nothing wrong with foreign visitors paying for NHS care – Yorkshire Post letters

WHEN I visit my family in Cape Town if I need to see a doctor, I go to the office situated in the waiting room and pay £40 to see a doctor. If I need any prescription drugs, I pay for those in the same office, end of story.

When my South African grandchildren have been ill in the UK, I have offered to pay for them but have been told there is no charge and I sign a form. This is truly absurd.

Our doctors cannot cope with existing patients and it takes two weeks for an appointment. Surely the practice managers can organise an office where people outside the UK can pay a charge to see the doctor and the appropriate charges should be enforced for treatment and operations?

Our NHS will collapse if free health is offered to all. In America if you cannot pay you are not seen. Every man and his dog will be over to England if free health is given to all.

Quite frankly we cannot afford it, no other country offers free care. It is absolutely nothing to do with racism. When my daughter had her children in South Africa, it cost her about £1,500 per child and she pays for all her healthcare.

How can the United Kingdom possibly afford to give free care? We will be inundated with health tourists. This must not be allowed to happen. As the Nigerian lady whose quintuplets cost the NHS £145,000 said, she would have paid the bill if she had received one. It is time common sense is applied.

From: Alan Tidswell, Dacre, Harrogate.

IT is often claimed by supporters of open door immigration that the NHS would collapse if it 
were not for doctors and nurses from India, Africa and 
other parts of the developing world.

This claim is no doubt true, but could someone please explain to me what is so noble about bribing such professionals whose own countries have 
spent considerable amount
of their scarce resources to
train them to look after their
own population and who, in many cases, suffer child mortality rates of Victorian proportions?

Great Britain has the resources to train its own healthcare professionals, but chooses in many cases to purchase “off the peg” by offering salaries that can only be dreamt of in the targeted countries.

The NHS should not be acting like a Russian oligarch buying professional footballers from around the world in order to top the Premier League!