Pay to push? What future for free healthcare

If you go into an American hospital be sure to have your credit card visible at all times or you may find that you are taken firmly by the arm and shown the door. This is not in fact true but what is true is that the first thing that you will be asked upon arrival is how you're going to pay and relieving you of your life savings and the roof over your head is a dead cert if you don't have insurance. Consequently if you want to avoid 'checking out' you will find that check out is the first and most prominent area you will find when you cross the threshold.

Contrast this with a British hospital. I don't know if you have ever been to the cashier's office in an NHS hospital but they're the devil to find. In the hospital where my wife gave birth it was buried in the bowels of the basement. The lugubrious lady behind the counter informed me that in decades of working there she had never seen daylight. It was plastered in stickers informing medical staff how to claim expenses.

When I explained that I had come to pay money the woman looked slightly taken aback and apologetically explained that the card machine was not working. The fact is that having kept us in (wholly unnecessarily) overnight after our baby's arrival my wife, not unreasonably, asked if we might be able to stump up for a room rather than enjoy the close harmony choir of the wailing ward.

Evidence that this was not the American way came from our being ensconced in the room BEFORE payment was taken and although the piece of paper proclaimed that we would be chivvied for bed and board if payment was not made before departure I wasn't so sure. I, of course, paid gladly.

As I trooped off to the cash machine with a spring in my step that I was not making imploring phone calls to my bank manager from the lobby of the Lindo Wing or portico of The Portland I reflected on how lucky we are to have all this laid on for free. Then a few days later, inevitably, this article appeared in The Mail: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7355681/Government-warns-NHS-hospitals-prepare-charge-newly-arrived-EU-citizens-No-Deal-Brexit.html

It claims that EU citizens already resident in the UK won't be liable to pay but who's going to chance a Eurostar trip to Paris after 'Independence Day' when the loss of free healthcare to my German wife may be the unexpected extra of being arbitrarily deemed a new arrival.

We have already endured absurdly more onerous requirements to obtain a British passport for our British born second son than his elder brother was subjected to applying in pre-lapsarian days. No explanation has been provided as to why the British passport authorities need to see the original German birth certificates of my in-laws complete with authenticated translations in order to issue a British passport to the British born child of a British citizen.

But the thing about slippery slopes is that they always start as imperceptible inclines. Not to worry though, the sovereignty is free, for everything else there is Mastercard.