Daily fail now moaning over ill babies recieving treatment because they don't have English mothers.

[comewhinewithme]

This article is so petty and pathetic Here

I can't believe that a mother with a baby in the unit can begrudge the same care going to another baby. I mean really, who thinks like that?

I think its reasonable to expect parents to pay for the care of their children if they are not resident in the UK. Most of us do this through our taxes. These health tourists are taking resources for treating us. We have no health visitors in our area and midwives have been cut back dramatically.

I do not have a problem with foreigners paying for NHS care. We do have some of the best hospitals in the world. It is a really difficult problem what to do with health tourists. No one wants mothers or babies to die. Prehaps we should insist on proof of health insurance on condition of allowing non EU citizens into the country.

We need to think how we punish health tourists who want to sponge off the NHS and clearly have no intention of paying. What is a fair and realistic punishment? Prehaps deportation of those who have outstayed their visa with a life time ban on entering the UK.

A cheaper and better way of helping poor foreign babies is overseas aid.

The NHS is paid by British taxes and is not free. Sad to say, its impossible to save every baby in the world.

If you have spent your life contributing to the NHS only to find that when the time comes for you to need it for a life or death situation you were refused the bed you are entitled to because the ward is full with people who have not contributed.

Are you telling me that if you lost your child you wouldn't feel resentment and outrage that your child was denied the treatment due to a messed up system that allowed non-contributing patients to take yours or your childs place.

I don't want any child or mother to die, but I have to be honest and admit that I think the article has a point.

If we had the resources and every mother and child was receiving the treatment they required I would think this was wonderful and would be very proud - but as it stands, mothers and babies are unable to be treated and they die. I just don't think it's fair that some of those that are dying are people that have paid for this care upfront only to lose a place to someone who hasn't.

nhs type care should be available worldwide it's not that we can't afford it, is it

i mean everyone in the world should pay a bit towards it

It's little wonder the nhs can not afford to provide medicines that would save/ prolong/ (give) quality of life for people living in this country when you have so many coming from abroad and sponging off our services and it's not just pregnant mothers who are cashing in either.

When they land on our shores visitors should be checked for health insurance ( a passport stamp prehaps)if they don't have one deport them.

If we go to another country and needed medical care we would be billed so why should anyone expect it for free here?

How many women have been turned away from maternity units because they are full? We should be taking care of our own residents.

the point is though that the daily mail is conflating two entirely different things

many babies in the uk today are born to mothers who were not themselves born in the uk (whilst offering no evidence at all that any of those mothers is here illegally/not entitled to free nhs care)

health tourism - no useful stats offered at all on the subject as far as I could see

so plenty of people will jump to the conclusion that most of those furrin mums are using up resources they are not entitled to. daily mail knows exactly what it's doing - appeal to the knee jerk reaction and bash johnny foreigner as well

Agree with sanfairyann.

My Brother had a burst appendix whilst in Australia, he had to walk back from the day surgery in crippling pain to get his credit card in order for someone to even look at him.

I know which healthcare system I prefer.

"When they land on our shores visitors should be checked for health insurance ( a passport stamp prehaps)if they don't have one deport them"

well that's fine - except for the fact the pelple from the EU are just as entitled to use our health services (I believe?) as we are theirs.

And anyone coming into the country to work is entitled to pretty much the same as you or I.

And being in London it's hardly suprising there were lots of foreign born mothers. As the article (rightly) says - absolutely NO way of determining whether those mothers have been her 10 days or 10 years.

Indeed a friend of ours could have ticked the "foreign born mother" box when she had a DS recently.......she's been here 15yrs and has been running a local corner shop (which is FAAAAAAAAAAAR cheaper and more affordable than the One Stop across the road) for most of that time. So paying her taxes just the same as British mothers - or not in hte case of those that have been on benefits since they left school..........

Would be interesting to have a similar graph for "those that are currently working, or have had either them or themselves working withn in the last 12-24 months" from British born mothers.........

"If you have spent your life contributing to the NHS only to find that when the time comes for you to need it for a life or death situation you were refused the bed you are entitled to because the ward is full with people who have not contributed."

well precisely - all those people who've been on benefits for years for whatever reason, born and bred here and making the most of the system...........oh sorry - you meant all the "scrounging" immigrant

just what I thought alwayslookingforanswers but you know your average daily mail reader would be gunning for them next

"Prehaps we should insist on proof of health insurance on condition of allowing non EU citizens into the country. "

oh well - that would have been my FIL's one (and probably only) visit to see his 3 oldest children in the UK for the last 6 months. He can't afford health insurance back home, and he definitely couldn't afford health insurance that would cover him while abroad.

As it happens he's needed quite a bit of treatment while he's been here (having had a near fatal RTA back home 2 days before he was due to have arrived)thankfully nothing "major" but lots of tests to check his sight, remove stiches, etc etc - he's had all of the treatment he needed.........paid for by my 2 SIL's.

Lizzylou Really? The UK and Australia have a reciprocal arrangement. Why didn't he go to the A&E at a public hospital. Medicare is quite similar to the NHS. Was he at a private clinic?

They also have no way of knowing whether the mothers of these babies are health tourists or UK citizens who were born overseas or people here on working visas.

what a load of "bullcrap" this article is, and the comments

As others have said, no mention of how many of these mothers are here legally (for how long) and paying taxes into the system. I highly doubt that many (if any) are health tourists.

Further in the article hospital spokeperson states "Of the 550 babies admitted to our Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) every year, a very small number of these are overseas patients. In 2009, there have been just two overseas admissions."

Those that object to foreign born mothers receiving treatment, would you prefer that resources go on a tax paying foreign born mother, or on a benefit recepient born and raised british mother? The whole argument becomes daft and we lose the values/principles that led to the creation of the NHS.

Still a bit new to this, my bolded bit didn't come out right.

Screw the DM.

I am foreign born and would be one of these evil foreign mothers giving birth in a London hospital. BUT, I have also been paying thousands of pounds in taxes for nearly a decade and barely used the NHS, schools etc. etc. so why should they have a go at me for using the facilities I pay for?

And, also, what about all the Brits going over to other countries and using their facilities? Haven't we had millions of articles about British people going to the continent and places like Poland for treatment? There was also that idiot boy on a gap year who got lost in the mountains in Australia, resulting in thousands of dollars being spent trying to find him. Or does the DM only object when "foreigners" come to the UK, and not the other way around?
Also, "The women were invited to put a dot on the map to 'represent' their home country". This may not necessarily be that they were born there, or just arrived a week ago on the plane to enjoy the NHS at the taxpayers expense, but maybe that their family is from that country. Such a stupid article. GAH.

What a ridiculous article!

I am foreign, although just this week have received a letter that my application for British Citizenship has been approved. I have paid around £2000 in fees to the Home Office over the past 7 years, along with paying taxes as I've worked the whole time. DH is British, so would my children be included in this "free-for-all" treatment that is so objected to?

A couple of years ago, when I was pg with dd, there were headlines to the effect that "1 in 4 babies in Britain are born to Forgein Mothers" and friends of ours were quoting this and then looking at me and saying "oh, but we don't mean YOU". Who then? Must be those "scrounging" immigrants again!

Ermm, my parents are Irish and me and my three sisters were all born in NHS hospitals, and have used the NHS at various points during our lives, so we'd fall into the 'children of a foreign mother' using NHS services.

The fact that our parents were working, paying taxes and claiming nothing from the state would no doubt have been of no interest if this article was being writen back then.

Also, London is a very diverse city with many nationalities, so this map shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. It would be a very different picture elsewhere in the country.

God bless the Daily Mail for continuing to keep the fires of intolerance burning brightly. They do it so well.

Hmm, no matter how good the arguments are against health tourists I simply cannot make myself feel anything approaching anger about our money being used to treat foreign babies. If our taxes are going to be 'wasted' on anything I'd quite like it to be this.
It's better than spending our money accidentally bombing them, isn't it?

I live in London and had my baby in a huge London teaching hospital. I was in hospital for five days and in that time came across one - just one - midwife who was British. There were a couple of Irish midwives, quite a few eastern Europeans, lots of African and Caribbean women and so on. They were mostly very nice and terribly professional and I dread to think what would have happened if the maternity ward had to rely on British-born midwives.

I wonder if you did a map of the home countries of the staff at the Chelsea and Westminster, how it would compare. I don't for one minute believe the entire staff of the neonatal unit are British-born...

well quite Verytiredmummy.
Where I live many of the doctors are foreign-born and very few of the patients.

Have re-read my post and I actually only have two sisters Point still stands though. And you're right Verytiredmummy, if 'foreigners' aren't to be encouraged in the NHS, there would be very few people working there anyway.

Vile article.

I am a foreign-born British citizenship. I have it by descent, because my Australian grandfather was on holiday in England when WW2 broke out and enlisted in the RAF on the first day because he could fly a plane and was a surgeon. My mother was born there while he, a foreigner, was fighting for Britain. If I'd taken my child to C&W when I lived in London, we would have been included in the DM's pernicious statistics.

Anyone who writes for or reads the Daily Mail is a fucking bigoted cunt.