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Health Minister Lord Howe said: "Having a universal health service free at the point of use rightly makes us the envy of the world, but we must make sure the system is fair to the hardworking British taxpayers who fund it.
"We know that we need to make changes across the NHS to better identify and charge visitors and migrants. Introducing charging at primary care is the first step to achieving this.
"We are already looking at taking action and next year we will set out our detailed plans to clamp down on the abuse of our NHS."
WHO GETS WHAT.
Free NHS care is offered to anyone living in the UK who has temporary or permanent permission to do so.
Asylum seekers, non-European Economic Area nationals who do not have permission to live in the UK, British expats, and visitors usually have to pay for treatment.
The UK has reciprocal agreements with most European nations and 28 other countries, and under these visitors are given free NHS care.
The NHS should claim these costs back from the relevant governments - but research suggests just £73m a year is recouped out of more than £460m at present
However
Medical tourism is a lucrative source of income for the NHS, according to a major new study that contradicts many of the assumptions behind the government's announcement that it will clamp down on foreigners abusing the health service.
Eighteen hospitals – those deemed most likely to be making money from overseas patients – earned £42m in 2010, according to researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and York University. Medical tourists spent an estimated £219m on hotels, restaurants, shopping and transport in the UK. the lead author of the new study, Johanna Hanefeld, from the faculty of public health and policy at the LSHTM, said the government-commissioned research published on Tuesday was "much more across the government immigration agenda than anything to do with health"
Their work, published in the open access journal Public Library of Science (PLoS) One, looks at incoming and outgoing medical tourists. Those flying in to the UK include expat Britons living in countries such as Spain which have tightened up their own rules on access to healthcare, they say.
Some NHS hospitals earn substantial sums of money from medical tourists and others could join them in doing so, say Hanefeld and colleagues
This post contains excerpts from http://bbc.in/19D1lPN and http://bit.ly/19D1p24
