American healthcare providers are notoriously hardhearted towards would-be patients without the ability to pay. Now British hospitals may become a little tougher on those who come here to exploit the health service.

The problem of the exploitation of the NHS by individuals from outside the EU may well extend beyond hospitals. GP surgeries, for instance, require only minimal evidence that patients are resident in the area, not proof that they are entitled to be here in the first place. At a time when the NHS faces unprecedented demands from an ageing population, it will have to become considerably more stringent in dealing with the problem of health tourism.

London Evening Standard, 17 September

A forecast by Deloitte Consulting published in August 2008 projected that medical tourism originating in the US could jump by a factor of ten over the next decade. An estimated 750,000 Americans went abroad for health care in 2007.

The growth in medical tourism has the potential to cost US healthcare providers billions of dollars in lost revenue, it said

http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/front/Zurich_hospital_turns_away_US_health_tourists.html?siteSect=105&sid=11189081&ty=st

20 September