Patients would be charged £8 a day when in hospital under proposals by a former health service chief to raise more money for the NHS.
Professor Stephen Smith is also urging ministers to charge between £4 and £8 to help cover the costs of medical equipment patients need, such as hearing aids and walking aids.
Over-60s should also start paying for their prescriptions, to help raise more revenue for an underfunded NHS that is under “unsustainable” pressure from rising demand, Smith said.
Rising public dissatisfaction with the health service and unprecedented patient waits for GP care, ambulances and routine operations mean ministers must urgently launch a review of how funds the NHS, which should include the creation of ‘co-payments’ for some services.
Smith, the former chairman of East Kent acute hospital trust, has set out his ideas in a new book published by thinktank RadixUK. Its trustees include former Tory health secretary Andrew Lansley and Labor MP Stephen Kinnock.
“I think the public would be willing to pay some additional charges,” said Smith, who has also sat on the boards of the Great Ormond Street and Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trusts in London. Means testing would ensure that the poor were not unfairly affected, he added.
People would have to pay an £8 fee for each day they are in hospital receiving medical care or rehabilitation, up to a maximum of 28 days a year, added Smith, who said his idea it was based on the system in Germany, where the patients are. charge €10 a night.
More money could also be raised for the NHS through financial penalties for abusing the NHS for repeatedly missing appointments, a mortgage tax to generate extra income for the NHS and social care, and tax relief for individuals with high incomes who take out private health insurance.
However, Dr John Puntis, co-chairman of the campaign group Keep Our NHS Public, accused Smith of advancing “obscure ideas” and “zombie policies” that would end the basis on which the service has operated since its creation in 1948, including that it is paid with general taxation.
“Charging people to cover part of the cost of a hospital stay would be a fundamental departure from the founding principles of the NHS and would show that the long-standing consensus on a tax-funded public service model has really been abandoned,” he said dots
Instead, the government should generate more money for the NHS through capital gains tax, corporation tax and private wealth tax, financial speculation and tax avoidance, he added.
Smith’s ideas come days after the head of the Royal College of GPs warned that GP services are under such strain that patients may have to start paying for them, just as most already pay to see a dentist
Professor Martin Marshall said: “We have ended up in a place where there is a very inadequate safety net [dental] service for those who cannot pay and most people pay for their dental care. Could general practice go like this? I could do it.”
Axel Heitmueller, senior fellow at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change and author of a recent report on the NHS, warned against co-payments. “They are effectively a regressive tax” that are expensive to operate, discourage poor people from seeking care and do not reduce the demand for medical care, he said.
Politicians risk a “high political price for little real gain” by introducing charges due to resentment among voters, most of whom think higher taxes are the best way to invest more money in the NHS .
The Department of Health and Social Care declined to comment.