David Cameron today hit back at Labour’s Diane Abbott as she claimed plans to charge foreigners hundreds of pounds a year for NHS treatment were “xenophobic”.
The Prime Minister strongly defended the proposed new levy on non-EU students or workers who come to the UK for more than half a year.
The fee, likely to be about £200 a year, will be an addition to the visa charge.
Mr Cameron told MPs that British families pay about £5,000 a year each in taxes to fund the NHS.“This is a national health service not an international health service,” he added. “It’s right to make sure that those people who don’t have a right to use our NHS get properly charged for it.”
Mr Cameron was responding to Tory MP Philip Lee, who said as a GP he was once called to Heathrow to see a woman who told him, through an interpreter, she had just realised she was nine months pregnant on arrival in Britain.
But shadow public health minister Ms Abbott was scathing in her criticism of the new charge, tweeting: “What price xenophobia? Stigmatising foreigners accessing NHS creates a public health risk.”
Dr Clare Gerada from the Council of the Royal College of General Practitioners warned the levy could lead to immigrants with highly infectious diseases ending up “wandering around for fear of being charged”. But the Department of Health said visitors with HIV would still receive free healthcare.
The changes are part of a government push to cut down on abuse of British services, but doctors fear they could find themselves turned into a “form of immigration control”.
