Of Course, It's Critical Of The New Regime...

...it's been done by people who long for Open Borders. And have marched for years through the institutions to ensure they get them:

The system for assessing who should be asked to pay for NHS services “incentivises racial profiling”, an investigation has found.

A study by the Institute for Public Policy Research found that overstretched NHS staff sometimes racially profile patients in order to determine who is not “ordinarily resident” in the UK, and therefore must pay for their care.

Well, yes. If your organisation is tasked with the job of ensuring foreign patients pay, you'll look to target foreigners, won't you? 

The report is critical of the more stringent charging regime introduced by NHS England over the past decade as part of a series of measures devised to create a hostile environment for people living in the UK without the correct immigration status.

Or 'protecting the public revenue', which is another way of describing their task. 

One of the officers told the IPPR study they had felt forced to discriminate between patients based on their name.

“If you’ve got a, I don’t know, Mohammed Khan and a Fred Cooper, you’re obviously going to go for [investigating] the Mohammed Khan … Even for someone who’s, you know, well I’d like to think hopefully open-minded, like myself, you’re just trying to save yourself time because there’s not enough hours in the day,” the officer said.

This is an argument for having more staff in the role, not scrapping the role altogether. And maybe for tightening up the selection process for hiring officers: 

A hospital employee also reported that discrimination on the basis of ethnicity was used to determine who should be billed for treatment.

“It’s a system that is designed to benefit [white] people like me, not people like … the patient on intensive care who is black and British and was unconscious and sent a bill. So why did someone think he was not eligible for care? Given he was unconscious most of the admission, significantly unwell, probably not his accent, more likely his skin colour,” the health worker said.

But once it was established he was entitled to the treatment, was he expected to pay? The answer's no, of course! 

Some healthcare staff told IPPR researchers that they disliked the extra burden of having to consider whether to refer a patient for charging, which they felt distracted them from their core medical responsibilities.

Oh, diddums! There's aspect of my job I'm not keen on, but I either do them regardless or leave for another job. I don't demand the company change! 

And I'm surprised it gets a chance to distract them. I thought filming TikTok videos and finding new ways to hide from patients took up all that time!

What does the report conclude? Go on. Surprise me!

The report, Towards True Universal Healthcare, recommends expanding eligibility for free healthcare to include all UK residents, regardless of their immigration status.

Yeah, put that one in the round file.