There are over 300,000 British pensioners permanently resident in Spain, but the UK does make an estimated contribution to the Spanish government for their healthcare costs.
What we’re talking about here is the cost of treating temporary visitors, i.e. tourists. What we find is that the EU27 has to spend £155 million a year on healthcare for ailing Brits, but the total NHS spend on looking after European tourists is only £30 million.
In particular Spain has to cough up £40 million a year treating poorly Britons in Spain, while the UK’s NHS only has to spend £3 million on sick Spaniards.
It’s much the same in France. The French government also has to pay roughly £40 million providing treatment to British tourists, whereas the UK only needs to pay £5 million to look after French citizens.
Germany spends £22 million on British tourists who end up as patients, but the UK needs to spend only £600,000 on ill Germans.
And so it goes on. The Austrians spend nearly 50 times more on UK tourists (all those ski accidents?) than the UK ever does on Austrians visiting us. The only country where there is any sort of balance is the Irish Republic where the costs are about £9.5 million in both directions.
Only four countries spend less on treating British visitors (Bulgaria, Latvia, Romania and Lithuania) than we do on their citizens – and that only cost us £1.6 million a year for them all taken together.
These figures are taken from an FoI Act request and relate to 2013-14. Clearly on the subject of “health tourism” the Tory leavers were talking rubbish as on so many other subjects.
Giles Goodall, Chair of the Brussels and Europe Liberal Democrats said recently,
“These figures are further evidence that free movement is a two-way street from which the UK benefits as much as, and in some cases more than, anyone else.”
“With 42 million visits by Brits to other EU countries every year, it is clear the UK is one of the biggest users of the right to travel freely – a benefit of our EU membership that the Tories put at risk.”
Picture by Fresenius SE & Co KGaA