The National Health Service is not an international system

Short-term migrants to Britain will be charged at least £200 to use the NHS.

Earlier this week health secretary Jeremy Hunt has announced that these charges will be added to the immigration bill passing through parliament.

Currently, temporary migrants who come to the UK either to study or to work, are likely to qualify for free hospital care as soon as they enter the British border.

Back in July, the NHS estimated the cost of health tourism at £12 million.

Mr Hunt, who suggested foreigners cost Britain £2 billion a year, instead, had also highlighted that the NHS is a national health service, not an international one and it should be fair on the British families and taxpayers.

EU visitors would continue to access free NHS treatments but ministers are planning to put in place systems for recovering the costs from their home countries.

Jeremy Hunt has proposed a new ‘registration and tracking system’ for visitors before they join a GP surgery, possibly linked to the NHS number.

Those without a formal residency status could be charged for non-emergency public healthcare and should be issued a temporary NHS number.

Meanwhile, those who work in the national healthcare have pointed out that all the checks potentially put into place to avoid that short-term migrants benefit from the system, along with the proposed ‘tracking system’, could cost far more than they save.

In fact, all these measures could possibly turn the medical staff into groups of border security officials.