Edition 61
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Friday, April 20, 2012
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THE ABC OF ABUSE By AMANDA BLACK
EVERYONE loves something for nothing...and with The Courier your freebies extend beyond just the best and fastest growing newspaper on the Costa Blanca. With next week’s issue, we are giving away thousands of copies of the 2011/12 Food&Drink Guide, an invaluable asset to anyone who enjoys eating out
locally. It’s packed with interesting information for sophisticated diners and features profiles of dozens of the area’s most popular restaurants. The Food&Drink Guide normally costs one euro but it’s FREE to readers who pick up their Courier at selected outlets next Friday. TWO freebies for the price of none - beat that!
THE Spanish daily newspaper ABC has launched an astonishing attack on the British Embassy for allegedly encouraging UK citizens to abuse the Spanish health system. Under the headline ‘The United Kingdom instructs its subjects to take advantage of the Spanish health system’, the paper took aim at the Embassy for simply outlining how the Spanish system works and explaining who is and isn’t entitled to public healthcare in Spain. The article in last Friday’s edition had a go at a guide on the Embassy’s website setting out the rules and documentation needed by different categories of Brits to claim health cover. The website gives advice to Britons working and paying into the Spanish system, students, resident pensioners, early retirees and holidaymakers. And it points out that if people are not entitled to healthcare, they need to take out private insurance cover. Similar guides are put out by British embassies all over the world. But ABC interpreted this sensible advice as a blatant attempt to encourage British citizens to abuse the And it attacked “health Spanish system. tourism”, using the term to The article complained refer to people coming to that the British Foreign Spain in order to take advanOffice, through the tage of the public health sysEmbassy’s guide, tem, which it said was recog“explained to British sub- nised by people in the British jects precisely how to ben- Isles as being one of the best efit from public health in in the world. our country”. The report put specific
Brits and Spanish healthcare: Embassy hits back at slurs
focus on the Valencian Community where it said health tourism was “widespread given the influx of British tourists to the Costa Blanca each summer and the 100,000 English who have a second residence in Alicante”. It stated that the health service in the commu-
nity every year served “800,000 foreign patients, mostly European, at a cost of 15 million euros for the regional coffers”. However, none of these patients could receive treatment for free unless they were entitled, a fact the ABC report did not mention. It also
failed to mention that the cost of treatment for many EU residents can be claimed back from the country where the patient is resident. ABC went on to say that according to the doctor’s union CESM, the interventions most in demand by health tourists are for cataracts and prosthesis “which are not covered by the state in the majority of countries”. The article neglected to add that these procedures are covered by the state in the UK. And ABC even attacked the Embassy for advising British citizens who live in Spain to sign on their town hall Padron, implying this was just some further ruse for Brits to get services for free in Spain, even though it is actually a requirement of the Spanish authorities. The
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