Years ago when I worked in Greece, families used to fly their poorly relatives to London to get better medical treatment. Now it’s cheaper, even with the cost of flights and hotels, to go to Lithuania for a hip replacement and Hungary or Turkey for a bit of dental work. ‘Health tourism’ is a big thing for all sorts of ailments, not just facelifts and boob jobs as used to be the case. And good business, I guess, for the medics and dentists who might once have hoped to come and work over here. I’m not, believe it or not, a qualified doctor, but my guess is that you get what you pay for, and various horror stories are already emerging of things going wrong without any chance or correction or redress. But that’s not really the point, is it. Noone should need to go in the first place.
“Rachel Reeves may be forced to raise taxes”
Why did she/they (in the old sense) think that tinkering around with IHT and CGT would be enough to sort out the NHS; and the potholes; and…and the list goes on. My guess is that they asked the Treasury for a list of anything not involving income tax that they could get away with lightly, although they should already have learned from the winter fuel stuff that all publicity is not good publicity.