Hospitals have been obliged to charge foreign patients before they receive treatment since 2017 PETER BYRNE/PADoctors have voted overwhelmingly to stop charging foreign patients for NHS care, claiming that doing so is “fundamentally racist”. Up to 500 delegates at the British Medical Association’s annual conference in Belfast backed a motion that said that asking overseas visitors to pay made medical staff “complicit” in racism. “We are doctors not border guards,” Omar Risk said during the debate. “Charging migrants for accessing NHS services is a fundamentally racist endeavour — we are complicit in the oppressive regime.”Doctors who opposed the motion were booed as they spoke against it on Monday, according to the Daily Mail. In 2017 Jeremy Hunt, then the health secretary, announced regulations that legally obliged…

Source: The Times June 26, 2019 02:37 UTC