Tower of Babel or arbitrage opportunity?
I pity the poor civil servant who has to implement this if indeed it comes to pass.
Britons travelling abroad for health care, ranging from dental work to open heart surgery, will have their treatment funded by the NHS.
They will simply have to pay their travel and accommodation costs, plus any top-up fees if charges in the foreign hospital are higher than NHS costs.
So a trip to Belgium for bariatric surgery perhaps, to Eastern Europe for dental treatment or the Scandinavian nations for infertility treatment that patients might theoretically be eligible for has the potential to wreck PCT budgets as well as strategy.
The plans say that patients should not be given drugs or treatments that their own state system does not fund, and that where there are waiting lists, domestic patients should have priority over foreign patients. Beyond that, EU residents would be free to travel for non-emergency care in any of its 27 countries.
Next week’s directive is an attempt to catch up with a series of European court rulings over the past decade which have ruled that there should be an open market in health care across Europe.
Just how is a hospital abroad supposed to decipher the availability of treatments in every PCT when it is not so clear to doctors within a few miles? A central clearing-house for such information with a clearly codified list of available treatments instead of the juggling of priorities that PCTs have to manage today? If indeed the proposals are accurately described, the devising of a solution to this would be a challenge to relish.