This Farage Immigrants with HIV Business

[wonderboy]

Your scenario never happens.

To say that it never happens in the millions of annual interactions with the NHS is stretching it a little, but I concede I am simplifying things vastly as is often done when discussing ethical questions.

As another poster pointed out and you alluded to; the world has changed around the NHS. This will necessarily require reform to ensure the it continues to serve the needs of citizens.

So far, so non-partisan.

But when these issues are discussed, most political parties deny there is an issue, cry "racist" and immediately stake claim to the moral high ground. They willfully misinterpret the comments of people like Farage as "blaming the immigrants", when he has said repeatedly he means nothing of the sort. There is a big difference between blaming immigration policy and blaming immigrants.

The hypocrisy is that it is that the other parties, whilst claiming the moral high ground, who are weaponising these issues for their own political gain, whilst accusing Farage of the very same thing.

[tomtomagain]

Farage was a complete idiot to have presented the argument as he did. He used highly emotive language which just opened him up to a free hit from the lefties on the panel.

The lefties as usual attacked the man, played the "You are a horrible racist" card and did not even attempt to discuss the issue that he raised.

[TykeMerc]

When it comes to any matters involving people from outside of the UK then the racist card is the unbeatable trump.

The whole racism issue (which still has some basis in fact although thankfully significantly less than the past) is so emotive and powerful in the context of the last decade + of extreme political correctness that it's impossible to counter.

Hell we even see the extreme sensitivity on here where a bolding of a name that happens to be of a certain ethnic background will get a ban hammer application.

[pjclarke]

Farage was a complete idiot to have presented the argument as he did. He used highly emotive language which just opened him up to a free hit from the lefties on the panel.

The lefties as usual attacked the man, played the "You are a horrible racist" card and did not even attempt to discuss the issue that he raised.

He also did his reputation as an honest broker no favours by inflating the numbers. He claimed 7,000 new diagnoses a year, the actual figure for 2014 was 5777 and falling. He claimed 60% of these were not British nationals, however nationality is not routinely recorded. We do know that for the 5 out of 6 cases where country of birth is known, 54% were not born here; a category that would include Mrs Farage.

Black Africans are over-represented amongst HIV sufferers, and they also have the largest proportion of undiagnosed cases, an estimated almost two in five (38%) black-African men and one in three (31%) black-African women living with HIV remained unaware of their infection, a total of around 13,000 people.

The legislation was changed in 2012, with overwhelming political support, to fight the further spread of the disease. The change was defended by the coalition on the grounds that it was essential to protect public health and prevent the spread of HIV. Free treatment would encourage testing, reduce levels of late diagnosis and the spread of infection, and cost the taxpayer less in the long run.

A back of the envelope calculation suggests that, if we accept Nige's worst case numbers and devise a way of preventing all the non British cases from arriving here, presumably by requiring them to get tested before they pitched up, the saving to the NHS would be around 76 million GBP per annum. Sounds like a decent sum, but it represents just 0.079% of the 95 billion NHS budget.

http://www.nat.org.uk/media/Files/Pu...th-Tourism.pdf

[darmstadt]

As posted above, he seems to have got his figures wrong: https://fullfact.org/factcheck/hiv_d...ationals-41402

[ASB]

I would be inerested in how much swings and roundabouts there is. How much do othergovernments spend on british nationals who are not contributing?

I have received pretty much free care in france, portugal and italy.

[Euler]

As others have noted the fact that Farage (and UKIP) consistently gets his/their numbers wrong doesn't give much confidence in them for the more intelligent, evidence-based voter.
The sums for health tourism are a mere drop in the ocean of the NHS budget and as others have noted, most notably the BMA, the cost of putting in place the admin for checking and administering a process for avoidance of health tourism would be greater than the sums saved.
That alone suggests it's not a big issue.

The rather ironic thing is that there is one issue on which I agree with UKIP's (original, pre U-turn) policy: that the NHS needs re-organisation on a European model and that involves some form of private and public partnership.
Unfortunately when the polls revealed that the average UKIP voter was older and more poorly educated, and hence likely to be a greater user of the NHS, on average, UKIP had to quash Farage's initial (correct) policy.
Thus proving that contrary to their supporters beliefs, UKIP, like any other party, will tell you what you want to hear.

[xoggoth]

He claimed 7,000 new diagnoses a year

As posted above, he seems to have got his figures wrong:

Once again people are focusing on relatively small inaccuracies in figures that hardly matter. Numbers newly diagnosed in a year are not a guide to total costs when treatment must continue for life. The EXTRA cost of treating those who come here each year may not be a large part of the NHS budget but don't forget that cost is cumulative. Each person that stays here will cost the NHS between £21 and £41k for treatment every year and very few immigrants pay enough NI/tax to cover that.

The important figure is the total annual cost of the foreign born with HIV, around 1 billion. The black African population in the UK rose by 150% between 2001 and 2011. In 2009 the UK had the highest number of new HIV diagnoses in Europe. If this continues the implications for HIV costs are obvious if we keep dismissing the problem as trivial and do nothing.

PS Not just Africa. Estonia has 6 x the UK rate of HIV!

[xoggoth]

There is of course no such thing as "only money". Everything we spend on these problems we do not need to have is money we cannot spend on our own people, even when they have paid NI and tax all their working lives. There are various treatments, because of drugs that are too expensive perhaps, that they are denied although those too are a very small part of the 95 billion NHS budget.

[Euler]

Once again people are focusing on relatively small inaccuracies in figures that hardly matter. Numbers newly diagnosed in a year are not a guide to total costs when treatment must continue for life. The EXTRA cost of treating those who come here each year may not be a large part of the NHS budget but don't forget that cost is cumulative. Each person that stays here will cost the NHS between £21 and £41k for treatment every year and very few immigrants pay enough NI/tax to cover that.

The important figure is the total annual cost of the foreign born with HIV, around 1 billion. The black African population in the UK rose by 150% between 2001 and 2011. In 2009 the UK had the highest number of new HIV diagnoses. If this continues the implications for HIV costs are obvious if we keep dismissing the problem as trivial and do nothing.

PS Not just Africa. Estonia has 6 x the UK rate of HIV!

Estimates of the TOTAL cost of health tourism, including HIV treatment i.e. treating people who shouldn't be entitled to treatment, range from 79 million (academic research) to 2 billion (Daily Mail claim).
Even if we take the (probably wildly inflated) Dail Mail claim as being true, this is not a significant figure in the context of the NHS budget.
However going to an insurance-based European model would solve that problem as well as other more fundamental problems with the NHS, but the British public seems to be wedded to the increasingly unsustainable funded at source model and no party wants to tackle the issue.