AOG
From the excellent fullfact.org website (always best to double-check there before relying on figures published in the press):
[i]When asked in the House of Commons for the sums lost in this way in March, Health Minister Anne Milton revealed that it had cost the public purse just shy of £7 million in 2009-10, some way short of Mr Littlejohn's estimate.
Where then does the £200 million figure come from, and what can explain such a wide divergence in the estimates?
After doing some digging, Full Fact found that the £200 million figure had been cropping up in discussions of health tourism for many years. We were able to trace its provenance back to an estimate made in 2003 by debt collection agency CCI Legal Services, which works with the NHS to recover payments owed.
As media reports made clear at the time, CCI had actually estimated that the costs could be anywhere between £50 million and £200 million (in choosing to report the higher figure, Mr Littlejohn is of course not alone).
The estimate is several times larger than the sums reported by Ms Milton because the Government's figure only considers recognised debts that have been written off, whereas CCI attempted to account for overseas patients that go undetected by the health service, and therefore claim free care for which they were not eligible.
We got in touch with CCI in order to try to put the £200 million figure into some kind of context, and while a spokesperson told us that the firm no longer held copies of the 2003 research, they were able to give us a bit more detail to the estimate.
Most significantly, the spokesperson told us that while they thought the likely costs incurred by overseas patients were still “significant”, they were likely to have fallen since the 2003 estimate was made, as there had been “greater awareness of the issue and greater effort to tackle it."[i]