Whole world entitled to free health care on the NHS
Posted by sim-o
July 24th, 2009
The Daily Mail hasn’t earnt itself the nickname The Daily Fail for no reason. This one is an epic.
Apparently some failed asylum seekers are to be allowed free health care on the NHS, that is currently denied to them. Sorry, I should’ve said ‘proposed’. They’re not currently allowed, and it isn’t definately going to happen.
It’s just a proposal.
According to the Daily Mail, the headline goes…
A million failed asylum seekers will get free NHS care in human rights U-turn
A million people will get NHS treatment. That is an assertion of fact. But it’s not a fact. It’s a proposal.
Digging deeper, but not much deeper. In fact only as far as the first line of the story itself…
NHS treatment will be available for tens of thousands of failed asylum seekers to ensure their human rights are honoured, it was announced yesterday.
So it’s not a millon failed asylum seekers, after all. it’s only tens of thousands. Not quite so shocking that number, is it?
The number has dropped significantly because certain criteria would need to be fullfiled, rather than just any asylum seeker. They would need to be destitute with children and various other things. So the proposal’s not open to all.
Strolling through the article the figures get a little more specific still…
There are understood to be around 450,000 failed asylum seekers who have not left the country, although only 10 or 20,000 are directly affected by the new rules.
So there is ‘understood’ to be less then half a million failed asylum seekers in the country and only just tens of thousands at the biggest guess or estimate.
Just think a little about what is being told here.
There are 450,000 failed asylum seekers. What proportion of total applications these failures are I don’t know.
Lets take the bigger 20,000 number that would be directly affected by the proposals. Which means that approximately 4.5% of failed asylum seekers are affected (for the better, remember).
But for the headline to be correct, 50x more failed asylum seekers would need to be eligible, which if it stayed at the same rate would mean there would have to be 22,500,000 failed asylum seekers. Let that sink in for a moment.
Twentytwo and a half million. Failed. Asylum seekers. A number equivalent to a third of the population of Britain.
As I said earler I have no idea of the proportion of total asylum applications the failed ones make, but how many applications are gonna be needed to get a failure rate of 22.5 million?
And where did this original one million figure come from?
According to the Mail, MigrationWatch.
Notes:
- I originally came to this Mail article via a post on the BNP site. That article says pretty much the same thing but with out the 10-20,000 figure and a bit more pro-BNP propaganda.
- I just realised that there is no time scale mentioned, either. Are these figure for a five year period? A year? Month? Half a week?
- I hope my maths has not let me down
originaly posted at sim-o.me.uk
Categories: Immigration |
Good to know that the Daily Mail is a bit more balanced than the BNP.
Daily Mail – Hurrah for the Facists all over again.
They should ‘hang their heads in shame’ as the commentators should say
I love MigrationWatch – the thinktank that doesn’t.
I imagine that The Mail puts together these headlines (’A million failed asylum seekers…’) hoping that readers will notice them, get a bit pissed off, and not read the ensuing articles.
One has to be careful reading any newspaper, making sure that you read entire items rather than the first few lines. Sometimes you can find the real story buried at the very end.
Why shouldn’t these people get healthcare, regardless of their nationality or immigration conditions? Shouldn’t it be the humanitarian thing to do?
Is the ideal Daily Mail world one in which you have to gingerly step over the decomposing bodies of asylum seekers on the way to the shops? The answer can only be ‘yes’.
I have just discovered this website, happily, for the very first time! It is absolutely wonderful to discover that humanity is not doomed after all and that there are rational, sensible people out there that have the sense to question the hateful sensationalism of the UK’s most antagonistic publication.
It seems as though a great number of people require a session with this eyeball-feast of scorn and hatred before being able to head into work, or on their lunch break just to provide enough rage to survive the day…
I have tried to find out what it is that people get out of reading this dross but no success as yet. Answers on a postcard?
All the best everyone,
Miguel
I am a legal aid human rights lawyer at a charity (kill me, I’m left-wing) and most of my clients can only access healthcare on the good-will of their GP. On the frontline, GPs are rebelling against any rulings that say they cannot provide healthcare, on the whole.
This applies mostly to my HIV+ clients, of whom there are a good few. The NHS are wonderful and most local NHS authorities are willing to pass a few cases through regardless of status to keep people alive.
There are not even a million asylum seekers. I wouldn’t be able to have evenings off and drink very heavily if there were.
The NHS is being used as a tool to stop immigration. I say dismantle it, if people paid for their own healthcare there would be no excuses to create resentment of immigrants. The people who are trying to enter this country intend to work, they are resourceful enough to get this far, it is those who are already here who use an NHS paid for out of other people’s money and I’ll bet a large part of that will have been paid for by immigrant workers. No NHS, no excuse to stop immigration.
That’s a… novel argument from my near-namesake there. Doesn’t it occur to you that a) there might be one or two disadvantages to dismantling the NHS ([cough]America[/cough]) and b) the Mail were plenty racist before the NHS existed?
Hi, Sorry about the similarity, the “cs” is instead of “x,”
But yes, many countries don’t have free healthcare because they can’t afford it, bet the Mail journos and their ilk can afford to leap over the top of the queue and go for private healthcare, the Mail are not interested in free helthcare and besides, those who need it most are being rationed, which puts it in the realm of medicaid in the US.
Best to scrap the thing and start with something else more fair.
Also, why do little Englanders think they are so special being able to walk into a doctor’s surgery and get treatment for free? The shoes that they walk in and the clothes that they glady pay next to nothing for are more than likely made by children with no access to clean water let alone medical treatment, free or otherwise. Sorry but it makes me a bit angry.
“and besides, those who need it most are being rationed”
Can you expand on this hyperbolic statement? As a pharmacist I know that ~72% of people getting NHS prescriptions are exempt from the prescription charge. We all face a sort of “rationing” in the form of NICE recommendations, but these extend to all sufferers, not the most needy.
This is only the half of it. The ever-reliable Biased BBC site brings terrifying news of organ-hungry illegals. The whole gruesome saga on:
http://opinionbeyondeducation.blogspot.com/2009/07/organ-of-state.html
Tragically typical.
Of course the idea of the ‘public health’ being a civilized and healthy circumstance for us all seems to escape these vicious scumbags.
Still, I guess if came to them & their families being affected they’d just leap to ever-more extreme ’solutions’, eh?
God I don’t know know how you trawl through that plebian shite every day without killing yourself. At least someone with a brain does it though, thanks.
I don’t get ‘free’ health care. I pay for it through taxation. I am what you might call part of the ‘respectable’ working class in rather old fashioned terms. I have little but what I do have was earned, I get less than the average wage, a fair bit less, without ever having qualified for subsidised housing or tax credits. After I have paid tax and rent I have little enough left.
So forgive me if I feel a little resentful for having to help pay for people with expensive medical conditions that have not contributed anything to this country. Yes it is a shame that they come from countries that cannot provide health care for anybody outside the ruling elite but in the middle of Browns bust and with unprecedented debt we have to consider if new labours immigration policy of let anybody in (at least anybody who has not fought for us) and throw nobody out (unless they are non Muslim British being extradited) with free health care as a asperation for those coming here . can be continued. When it would be more cost effective to pay for forigners with no ties to this country to be treated in thier own countries from the already large amounts of money we give as charity, government and private, to them evey year.
Ron, are you sure that the immigration policy is to just let anybody in? Besides, these provisions aren’t for immigrants, they are in the slightly different category of asylum seeker, or in old fashioned terms ‘refugees’. They are for an extremely small percentage of people in very dire circumstances.
It would be better to improve healthcare in the home country of these people. I am not sure how much of an effect it would have on their leaving their country but either way that is a slightly different issue of how charity and aid is used and the conditions under which it is given.
The issue here is helping, or not, a small but vulnerable amount of people that, although cannot stay in this country, need help.
Ron, instead of throwing up a load of ‘whatabout….’ questions how about sticking to the subject?
‘New Labour’s immigration policy’ is an immigration policy tighter than any that has gone before (as in fact is the case with every UK Gov since the late 1950s).
They have not just let everyone in.
They have seen a large movement of workers coiming in from the EU.
Which is nothing like the same thing.
Asylum is also a completely unrelated issue.
Given that everyone is a taxpayer these days (thanks to the tory shift to indirect taxation) it can hardly be said that anyone living here does not contribute……whether they should be here or not.
We’re all taxpayers now.